14 24 1045 https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f6074e32c9417238e4d4fd2739a6cce9.pdf 81c7d4f330aefe1a7166442f4444b1ec PDF Text Text Life’s Deepest Questions Before the Mystery of God Job 23:1-10; Ecclesiastes 3:1-22; John 1:1, 14 and 18; I John 4:7-8, 12 and 16 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Center at Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan August 21, 2011 My proposal for today’s reflection refers to four biblical passages but they are chosen not to be carefully interpreted but rather in the way they speak to my central concern in this presentation – life’s deepest questions as we live before the face of mystery, the mystery to which we point with the word-symbol God. Already you may say the task will be to bring to awareness our deepest questions but, more than that, to seek some understanding of the reality to which our word God points. And you would be right. Before I move into my subject, let me give you an assignment. If you could have an answer to one, deep, ultimate question about reality, about God, about your human future or any other large question that looms before your mind when consciously thinking about it, or when in a semi-conscious, somewhat dreamy state, what would that question be? Maybe you know immediately because you are one of those persons who can’t help yourself but wonder what it means to be human, is there a God, where is your life, the life of humanity, heading, will there be an End, a consummation of some sort, will there be one end for all or will there be a great divide of “sheep and goats”? Perhaps you are simply busy with getting through your days and seldom wonder about such ultimate questions – enough to worry and wonder about the stock market, our broken political system, your health and that of those you love, your children, your grandchildren. You see what I’m saying. Some simply can’t help themselves – the wonderers and worriers, and some stick to life’s practical concerns. I suspect those who wonder may have had rather intensive and extensive exposure to life’s ultimate issues and perhaps those of a more practical bent have not been immersed in a family or community where ultimate issues are daily fare. But even such sometimes lie awake wondering. Sometimes it is triggered by a crisis. Remember the suffering of Job. One of the most pathetic and moving cries ever recorded is found in that profound drama of Job. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University   �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 2   Job Replies: My Complaint is Bitter Then Job answered: “Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge. If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him.; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come out like gold.” (Job 23:1-10) But there are others – I am one of them – that just can’t help themselves, crisis or smooth sailing, the wondering seldom ceases. The Hebrew poet who authored the Book of Ecclesiastes was such a person. Critical studies of the text assure us that this was not the wise King Solomon though tradition has made him the author. Ecclesiastes is part of the Wisdom section of the Hebrew scriptures and was probably written in the middle of the third century BCE – around 250. The Wisdom literature of the Old Testament is an attempt to gain knowledge of human existence in order that one may know how to live – how to live wisely, how to live well. It’s a special genre of literature. It has a different nuance, a different tone, than so much of the rest of Scripture. It raises those questions about the nature of our experience of being human, seeking to find the meaning and purpose of it all. And it reads that meaning and purpose off from experience itself; it doesn’t go to a priest, it doesn’t go to a sacred text, it doesn’t go to an institution, but rather the sages of the tradition of Israel were careful observers of life, trying to discern meaning and purpose from what was observable and what could be comprehended within the parameters of human knowledge and human understanding. With Ecclesiastes, we come to the farthest extreme of wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures. The author purports to have lived widely, broadly, deeply. He tried everything – pleasure, riches, work, everything that his heart desired he granted to himself. And, in the end of it all, his conclusion was that human life is empty. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity says the Lord.” Chasing wind. He is a person who, having entered broadly into human experience, concludes that its meaning and its purpose are not discernable by the human mind. Just reading from human experience, he can find no ultimate purpose. He doesn’t deny that God is, he doesn’t deny that God will hold us accountable, but God is largely absent and God © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 3   is inscrutable. The meaning of our human existence is inscrutable. So this is a very pessimistic account of what it means to be human. He simply says over and over and over again…there is nothing new under the sun…whatever has been will be again…it’s an endless cycle…a dead end street. Or, as in the title of the French existentialist Camus’ novel, No Exit. That is his analysis of the human situation from what he sees in human experience. He recognizes that the human person isn’t satisfied with that. He himself isn’t satisfied with it. The familiar third chapter speaks of the full spectrum of human experience – for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die. After a considerable list of “times” and “seasons” and the full spectrum of human experience, he makes about as positive statement as it is to be found in the whole poem. What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. (Ecclesiastes 3:9-13, NRSV) I came upon a translation of those verses which I like. I’m not enough of a Hebrew linguist to know if the Hebrew text justifies this rendering but I must say it seems to capture cogently what I sense the poet is trying to say in verses 11-13: God has made everything beautiful in its own time and has put an eternal yearning in our hearts even as we live before the Face of Mystery. I know there is nothing better for humankind than to be happy and to enjoy themselves as long as they live – to eat and drink and take pleasure in all their endeavors. I confess “Face of Mystery” is my phrase but it fits and I think is faithful to the writer’s intention – a sense of past and future but no way to figure out what God is up to. Consequently, “eat and drink and take pleasure in all their endeavors.” Let me pause here. Have you identified your ultimate question for which you long for an answer? My babbling on has made that rather impossible unless you live consciously with that question so that immediately you respond, “I wish I knew the answer to…..” © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Well, we can’t go around the room and hear your questions. I hope simply raising the question has perhaps brought to your awareness that, indeed, you do wonder about deep questions of our human existence, the movement of history, the meaning of it all. When I was still preaching regularly, pre-retirement, on Saturday morning I would check out the Religion section of the Grand Rapids Press, hoping to find some essay or article of religious news that would connect with the sermon on which I was working – maybe underscoring the theme or maybe some claim, in my opinion, so incredible it reinforced my claim to the contrary. Well, having announced my theme, “Life’s Deepest Questions Before the Mystery of God,” you can imagine how excited I was to open the latest issue of The New Yorker (August 15 & 22, 2011, p. 87ff) and find an essay entitled “Is That All There Is?”, subtitle “Secularism and its Discontents,” by James Wood, a critic at large. On the opening page against a black background are billowing clouds on which sets a throne; the throne is empty! Obviously the essay will deal with the disappearance of God which, for my purposes would have been interesting but not really my point. The article however aims precisely at my announced theme. The essay begins: I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life – beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward – is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties – religiosity on one side, secularism on the other – and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa. These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that they are not valid questions because it has already answered them; atheism assumes that they are not valid questions because it cannot answer them. But as one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, such moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night. I think of these anxieties as the Virginia Woolf Question, after a passage in that most metaphorical of novels “To the Lighthouse,” when the painter Lily Briscoe is at her easel, mourning her late friend Mrs. Ramsay. Next to her sits the poet, Augustus Carmichael, © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 5   and suddenly Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might stand up and demand “an explanation” of life: For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!: she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face. Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions Lily wants answered. More precisely, these are the questions she needs to ask, ironically aware that an answer cannot be had if there is no one to demand it from. The essay is excellent – worth the price of the magazine! I cite it here because it underscores that deep questions of life come to all of us one time or another, whether we are seriously religious or claim to be totally secular, atheist, agnostic, militant or mild. Our cultural history moves in waves. It is senseless to think religious faith and practice will fade completely from the human story with secularism and/or atheism becoming dominant and vice versa. The fact is humans are self-conscious beings who wonder, ask questions, and recognize they live in the face of mystery. As I acknowledged above, my title points to deep questions, but such questions before the face of Mystery, the mystery to which we point when we use the wordsymbol God. As I wondered, read, reflected in the latter years of my ministry I referred more and more to the source and ground of reality as mystery rather than God per se. God is such a loaded term so filled with our preconceptions – loaded with pre-critical traditional content. My dear deceased friend and last mentor, Dr. Duncan Littlefair, in his early years at Fountain Street Church, did not use the word “God” at all because it carried such baggage for most religious folk. In order to say something new in heavily churched, widely traditionally religious Grand Rapids around mid-century, that word-symbol was quite useless. And I suspect that continues to be the case. I’m sure the use of Mystery as a symbol for God in my case, particularly in the early 90’s was the consequence of realizing the Christian tradition’s idea of God was a personal Being outside of our cosmic reality – not really an old man with flowing beard as often caricatured – nonetheless a “superhuman.” The human created in the image of God according to the Genesis stories, God’s Being would be reflected in human being, except God was omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, etc. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 6   It is not my purpose to pursue that further. I mention it because when I was becoming more and more sensitive to what I was coming to see as the wrong signals given off by the word-symbol God, I fled to the designation “Mystery,” and I kept the Mystery – the Mystery had no “contours,” really no content. About this time it was my good fortune to come on a work by Gordon D. Kaufman, a theologian at Harvard Divinity School, who died in July of this year. In a major constructive theological work, In Face of Mystery, Kaufman wrote of God as Mystery in light of our present knowledge of the cosmos, of the human story and the human person. In a following volume, God, Mystery, Diversity, he dealt with “Christian Theology in a Pluralistic World.” It was Kaufman who helped me understand Mystery as applied to ultimate reality rather than a term to enable me to avoid using the word God. Kaufman opens chapter 6 of the latter volume entitled “Mystery, God, and Human Diversity” with a quote from the great Catholic theologian Karl Radner. What is made intelligible is grounded ultimately in the one thing that is self-evident, in mystery. Mystery is something with which we are always familiar, something that we love, even when we are terrified by it or perhaps even annoyed and angered, and want to be done with it….what is more self-evident than the silent question that goes beyond everything which has already been mastered and controlled…? In the ultimate depths of [our] being [we know] nothing more surely than that [our] knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled. It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea…. Hence the [deepest] question for [us humans] is this. Which [will we] love more, the small island of [our] so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery? Kaufman adds, “This profound mystery – or better the many mysteries – of life provides the ultimate context of our existence as self-conscious beings. Paradoxically, then, it is in terms of that which is beyond our ken that we must, on the last analysis, understand ourselves.” ( p. 96) And he then defines “Mystery” as he employs the term. “Mystery” (as I am using the word here) does not refer to a direct perceptual experience of something, as do words like “darkness” or “dense fog” (when we cannot see anything), or words like “unclear” or “obscure” (when used of some distant object that we cannot discern well enough to identify with confidence). It refers to bafflement of mind more than obscurity of perception. A mystery is something which we cannot think clearly, cannot get our minds around, cannot manage to grasp. If we say that “life confronts us as mystery,” or “whether life has any meaning is a © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 7   mystery, or “why anything at all exists, instead of nothing, is a mystery,” we are speaking about intellectual bafflements. We are indicating that what we are dealing with here seems to be beyond what our minds can handle. Thus when, in theological discourse, we call attention to the mystery of human existence, the mysteries in which we live, we are reminding ourselves that in theology we are dealing with matters at the very limits of our intellectual capacities; we are involved with profound puzzles, conundrums that we cannot solve and that we should not expect to solve. We must be cautious at every point, therefore, about what we take ourselves to be achieving in our reflection. In theology a question mark must be placed behind everything that is said. Sometimes (as in the ancient Greek mystery religions, from whence our modern word comes) “mystery” is thought of as descriptive of some object of arcane theological awareness or knowledge – perhaps God – rather than as prescriptively applying to us, to the limitedness of our knowledge and the questionableness of our attitudes. This way of thinking opens the door to obscure – but often exciting – claims, claims for which no grounds can be offered but which may seem theologically important. Speakers or writers may announce, for example, that they are in a position to “unveil” some particular mystery for us, allowing us to see what we could not otherwise see – like a landscape after the fog has lifted, or a dark room after a light has been turned on. The use of perceptual metaphors in talk of this kind only helps to encourage confusions; for this way of speaking leads us to suppose that we are being given information about realities hidden from others, possibly “secrets known only to God.” However, I want to point out that when we say of something that “it is a mystery,” this does not in fact tell us anything specific about that of which we are speaking, or which we are seeking to understand. Rather, it calls attention to something about ourselves: that we seem to have reached a limit to our powers at this point, and we may, if we are not careful, easily become confused or misled. The word “mystery” in its theological employment, thus, should be taken as a kind of warning that our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking are beginning to fail us and that special rules in our use of language should now be followed: take unusual care; beware of what is being said; the speaker may be misleading you; you may be misleading yourself; attend to what is being said with critical sensitivity to its problematic character. (p. 96f) I found Kaufman’s discussion of mystery so very illuminating. The context of our lives is mystery – not a mystery that will become clear with more penetrating analysis, greater intellectual prowess, deeper piety – no; rather, “it is in terms of that which is beyond our ken that we must, in the last analysis, understand ourselves.” In my field of interest – the theological – I must go in with eyes wide open; what I am dealing with is beyond what our minds can handle. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 8   Strange calling to which I responded! One’s whole orientation turned to that which is unavailable! And the deep ultimate questions one must face in oneself and in one’s community are questions for which there is no intellectual answer that doesn’t end with a question mark! As Kaufman contends, it is precisely because mystery pervades our search and research that “we must engage in relentless theological criticism of our human faiths, their symbols, and the practices they inspire.” Religions (and theologies) have a critical role to play even if they do not convey absolute dogmatic information about the mystery that is behind our reality. Kaufman claims, …a major function of religions (and of theologies) is to present human beings with visions of the whole of reality. That is, religions (and theologies) provide construals of the ultimate mystery within which human life transpires – construals that are sufficiently meaningful and intelligible to enable us humans to come to some understanding of ourselves in relation to the enigmatic context within which our lives proceed, and which are sufficiently attractive to motivate women and men to live fruitfully and meaningfully within this context. (p. 98) Reflecting on my own wrestle with the mystery and life’s deepest questions, one of the most illuminating and liberating insights Kaufman’s work gave me was the idea of theology as a human imaginative endeavor. I felt a load lifted. I still remember saying to my people, “If you grant me that theology is a human imaginative construct you are on a slippery slope and I will have great freedom to construe the faith.” Kaufman’s statement explains, One of the most important features of the understanding of theology as our own imaginative construction is that it requires us not to confuse our ideas and reflection – especially when we speak of God – with that ultimate mystery with which we are attempting to come to terms. This helps keep us honest in our theological work, on the one hand, and it acknowledges, on the other, the full independence of God from what we may think or say. In reminding ourselves that God is mystery to us, we allow God in God’s concrete actuality to be whatever God is, quite apart from our conceptualizations. In this respect, the concept of mystery, just because of its emptiness and openness, can help us face in a very direct way what it means to take God’s reality seriously, to confess the God that is truly God, the ultimate reality not to be confused with any of our human imaginative constructions. ( p. 99) One can only imagine how many religious wars would have been averted, how many church divisions could have been avoided, how many personal/family wounds would need not have to have been inflicted if the human family had early © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page 9   on learned that, in its quest for ultimate truth, it had to do with human imaginative constructs rather than claims of absolute divine revelation. Let me be clear; this is not a cop-out; it is simply the necessary consequence of our human historical situation. We have come to see the long history of the cosmos, the billions of years of cosmic evolution, the emergence of consciousness, of self-consciousness – the human being. All of this has only relatively recently been available in terms of cosmic time. But prior to this exploding “revelation” of the cosmic process, the advent of the Enlightenment, the modern with the emergence of the empirical approach to nature and human critical rationality surveying the long evolutionary process of which we are part, the deep questions of human existence had long engaged the human family. The mythology of ancient peoples, the great religions as they emerged addressed those questions. From our historical perspective it is easy to expose their naivete´ in terms of our knowledge of the evolution of nature, the emergence of the human. God, caricatured as an old superman with flowing beard pulling the strings of the universe, can easily be mocked and a three-story universe with heaven above and hell beneath, assumed by ancient religious conceptuality, becomes laughable. Add to that outmoded cosmology and God-concept all the anguish of religious conflict, violence, war and one doesn’t have to be terribly profound to make a case for the abolition of religion in the cause of human wellbeing. The contemporary militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens have fodder enough for their anti-religion campaign. And then there are the softer attacks by New Age types who suggest spirituality as opposed to religion, failing to recognize religion is simply the form one’s spirituality takes and spirituality without practice – prayer, ritual, liturgy – and community is weak pablum. David S. Toolan, S.J., has written insightfully on the subject of New Age spirituality. In CrossCurrents, a journal of The Association for Religious and Intellectual Life, Fall, 1996, he wrote an excellent piece, “Harmonies, Convergences and All That: New Age Spirituality.” Under the heading “Testing Syncretism” Toolan writes, Almost by definition popular movements are out of balance – and this one is. In part, the imbalance is a reaction to an aberration at the heart of organized Christianity, to the fact that for centuries both Catholic and Protestant churches inverted a great Pauline maxim, conveying the impression that where grace abounds, sin doth more abound. For that very reason, both the churched and the unchurched draw a distinction these days between “organized religion” (bad) and “spirituality” (good). The latter has to do with experiential practice – the kind of thing parishes too rarely offer but the local spiritual growth center does in profusion. (p. 376) © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page10   There you have it – “a reaction to an aberration” – as the militant atheists rail against an old Theism built on a worldview undone by the progress of scientific knowledge. Toolan concludes his critique of New Age Spirituality thus: Your average New Ager has discovered the interior life and is captivated by the vision of being a responsible global citizen, a one-worlder. But all too often the energy of this vision, unsupported by any institutional means of realization, is drained away by the individualistic habit of turning everything into a consumer item for the exclusive benefit of the omnivorous self. New Age spirituality is not Buddhist enough, not selfnoughting enough. And let me say it outright: it is not Catholic enough, in the sense of a commitment to a church that denies us the luxury of retreating to a private enclave of the like-minded when hell rages on our streets and paradise is indefinitely postponed. One who would face seriously the deep questions of our human existence need not be distressed by the explosion of knowledge of the cosmos, of growing understanding of the history of the human family, the psychological and biological probing of the human person. New knowledge, fresh understanding is to be welcomed. No need to deny scientific development that puts old issues in a new framework. No need to defend old ideas in whatever field – biblical interpretation or credal expression – that obviously reflect understanding now shown to be simply wrong. The reason the advance of human knowledge can be welcomed and theological conceptions and biblical claims need not be defended against that advance is that those credal and biblical claims were simply human beings seeking ways to live and be with life’s deep questions in the framework of their worldview. The ancient religions were affording people of their times ways of being in the presence of mystery – their own best efforts falling short of unveiling the mystery because the mystery cannot be unveiled through intellectual analysis. That is the crucial insight that must be recognized. Once recognized, new knowledge is welcomed, old answers can be discarded, and we can continue to live in the presence of mystery with ancient ritual, communities of faith, realizing that beyond our keenest intellectual pursuit that lays bare the secrets of the universe, there lies a realm/being on which all rests that cannot be penetrated. So what is your one ultimate question to which you would desire an answer? Do you remember the Peggy Lee hit song, “Is That All There Is?” Is That All There Is? I remember when I was a girl Our house caught on fire And I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face As he gathered me in his arms And raced to the burning building out on the pavement © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem And I stood there shivering And watched the whole world go up in flames And when it was all over I said to myself “Is that all there is to a fire?” Is that all there is? And when I was twelve years old My daddy took me to the circus The greatest show on earth And there were clowns And elephants Dancing bears, And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads And as I sat there watching I had the feeling that something was missing I don’t know what But when it was all over I said to myself “Is that all there is to the circus?” And then I fell in love With the most wonderful boy in the world We’d take long walks down by the river Or just sit for hours gazing into each other’s eyes We were so very much in love And then one day He went away And I thought I’d die But I didn’t And when I didn’t I said to myself “Is that all there is to love?” I know what you must be saying to yourselves If that’s the way she feels about it Then why doesn’t she just end it all Oh no. not me. I’m not ready for the final disappointment ‘Cause I know just as well as I’m standing here talking to you that when that final moment comes and I’m breathing my last breath I know what I’ll be saying to myself “Is that all there is? © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University Page11   �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page12   Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing Let’s break out the booze and have a ball If that’s all there is Good question; not, in my opinion, a very good response. If we can’t find an intellectual answer to our deep life questions, where do we turn? How about the way of the heart? Pascal famously said, “The heart has reasons the reason knows not of.” The knowing of the brain is not our only way to know, maybe not even our most important when it comes to life’s ultimate issues. What is ultimate reality? Mystery. But is that all we can say? I value the suggestion, the claim of John’s Gospel and the First Letter of John. In the Gospel, chapter one, we read, “No one has seen God.” That is repeated in I John 4:12. So mystery is acknowledged. But in John 1:14 the “Word” (Logos in Greek –the rationality of the universe) becomes “flesh” – human and, according to the Gospel writer, the human is the clue to the mystery of God. And the writer of I. John goes further – God is love and the one who dwells in love dwells in God. I take it what we have acknowledged cannot be known intellectually can be experienced _ the experience of the heart where love dwells. This has been a growing edge for me – Rifkin’s Empathic Civilization argues persuasively that empathy is at the core of the human. Sorokin in The Way and Power of Love argues powerfully that love is at the core of the cosmos, the grain of the universe. Jesus said, be Godlike – love your enemies. Love, compassion, grace – those are the ingredients of a fully human existence. Finally one must choose – the way of intellect which hits a wall or the way of the heart that experiences the heart of the mystery. The two ways are set forth starkly by two great thinkers – the biologist Jacque Monod and the theologian Hans Küng. The alternatives are matters of the posture of the heart. It is a matter of looking at the data, and then trusting or not trusting. Jacque Monod is a world-class biologist, a Nobel prize winner who wrote the book Chance and Necessity. What he describes in these little lines that I will read could very well be the modern description of the human situation to which the writer of Ecclesiastes referred. Monod writes this, “If he [that is, the human person] accepts this negative message, [that is, what he can read from the human situation, the cosmological situation], in its full significance, then one must at least awake out of his millinery dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world, a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes.” That is honest and hard hitting, and clear eyed. If there is no one home in the universe, then we are alone and the world is deaf to our music. The world is indifferent to our hopes, to our © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Life’s Deepest Questions Richard A. Rhem Page13   sufferings, to our crimes. So says Monod, so says the writer of Ecclesiastes. That’s as much as you can decipher. That’s as much as you can discern just from the observation of human experience. An equally intelligent twentieth-century person, Hans Küng, in his book Does God Exist? Wrote this: (This is the other side of the other side of the coin. This is written by one who trusts.) “To trust in an eternal life means, in reasonable trust, in enlightened faith, in tried and tested hope. To rely on the fact that I shall be one day fully understood, freed from guilt, and definitively accepted and can be myself without fear, that my impenetrable and ambivalent existence…” He agrees with Monod, he agrees with the writer to the Ecclesiastes – “my impenetrable and ambivalent existence.” Like the profoundly discordant history of humanity as a whole will finally one day become profoundly transparent, and the question of the meaning of history one day finally be answered. Finally one must choose. In my experience it is the way of the heart that brings peace and wellbeing. Recently I conducted a funeral. There were wonderful tributes offered about the deceased – a fine human being who had done so much good for so many. The family brought his favorite CD, Ronan. It is by an Irish tenor, Ronan Tynan. The number selected was “Going Home” whose two verses were separated by “Amazing Grace.” The music was beautifully rendered. When it was over that whole large gathering sat in quiet peace - it was a beautiful moment. The impact was palpable. Reasoned discourse has its place; no denigration of that. But music is another medium; it moves the heart and suddenly one “knows” what cannot be known – and all is well. Whatever is your deepest question, listen with your heart to the music of the universe – and you will know beyond knowing and all will be well all will be well all manner of things will be well. References: Gordon D. Kaufman. In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Harvard University Press, 1995. David S. Toolan, S.J., “Harmonies, Convergences and All That: New Age Spirituality,” CrossCurrents, Fall, 1996. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5c0538bfe5d6875752229b6db4cc30b4.m4v 1aa0cf824ab629b26d6bcba366b47a1b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Center Gathering Scripture Text Job 23:1-10, Ecclesiastes 3:1-22, John 1:1, 14, 18, I John 4:7-8, 12, 16 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Gordon D. Kaufman. In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Harvard University Press, 1995, David S. Toolan, "Harmonies, Convergences an All That: New Age Spirituality," CrossCurrents, Fall, 1996. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20110821 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-08-21 Title A name given to the resource Life's Deepest Questions Before the Mystery of God Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 21, 2011 entitled "Life's Deepest Questions Before the Mystery of God", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Center Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Job 23:1-10, Ecclesiastes 3:1-22, John 1:1, 14, 18, I John 4:7-8, 12, 16. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/x-m4v application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives God as Mystery Hebrew Scriptures Wisdom Literature https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e9da8d2281b5ad8ac940326248bcd819.pdf 06bb24733b3f17c56c66a45d3836d9fa PDF Text Text Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Matthew 5: 1-14; 38-48; I John 4:7-8; 12, 16b Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges, Michigan July 17, 2011 –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– The theme for today’s reflection has been announced as: Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe The first letter of John affirms, “God is Love.” Pitirim A. Sorokin concluded that, with the birth of the atomic age, humanity needed more than ever a quantum leap both in the scientific understanding of altruistic love and its implementation. By the late 1940s, he was especially interested in discovering how love for others is related to their felt participation in a presence that is higher than our own and that serves as a source of unlimited love across all divisions of tribal, religious, political and ethnic loyalties. Sorokin’s The Ways and Power of Love, published in 1954, is a careful scientific analysis of love with regard to its higher and lower forms, its causes and effects, its human and cosmic significance, and its core features. Combining Biblical insights and Sorokin’s analysis, I will claim love is the core of reality reflected in the grain of the universe. As you can well imagine, it is one thing to stake a claim; it is quite another to establish it. My intention here is to hear Sorokin’s contention and show how it aligns with New Testament teaching and especially the Way of Jesus as it comes to expression in the Sermon on the Mount. My endeavor is not the introduction of material foreign to Sorokin’s research. Indeed, he begins his Preface with a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount and goes on to relate his own personal experience that caused him to embark on his life’s work – the description of and advocacy for altruistic love. Sorokin begins, Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. In 1918 I was hunted from pillar to post by the Russian Communist Government. At last I was imprisoned and condemned to death. Daily, during six weeks, I expected to be shot, and witnessed the shooting of my friends and fellow prisoners. During the subsequent four years of my stay in Communist Russia I underwent other painful experiences and observed, to the heartbreaking point, endless horrors of human bestiality, death, and destruction. Exactly in these conditions I jotted down in my diary the �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 following “observations of a cold intellect and plaintive murmurs of a saddened heart”: “Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned three things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind. Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world. Fulfillment of duty is another marvelous thing making life happy. This is my second conviction. And my third is that cruelty, hatred, violence, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral, or material millennium. The only way toward it is the royal road of all-giving creative love, not only preached but consistently practiced.” Some thirty-five years have passed since these lines were written. The tragic events of these years, as well as my scientific studies, immeasurably reinforced these beliefs, and led me even to the establishment of the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. Now more than ever before I believe in the following truths, which are fully confirmed by our experimental studies: Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love. Unselfish love has enormous creative and therapeutic potentialities, far greater than most people think. Love is a life-giving force, necessary for physical, mental, and moral health. Altruistic persons live longer than egoistic individuals. Children deprived of love tend to become vitally, morally, and socially defective. Love is the most powerful antidote against criminal, morbid, and suicidal tendencies; against hate, fear, and psychoneuroses. It is an indispensable condition for deep and lasting happiness. It is goodness and freedom at their loftiest. It is the finest and most powerful force for the ennoblement of humanity. Finally, only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strife, and can prevent the pending extermination of man by man on this planet. Without love, no armament, no war, no diplomatic machinations, no coercive police force, no school education, no economic or political measures, not even hydrogen bombs can prevent the pending catastrophe. Only love can accomplish this miracle, providing, however, we know well the nature of love and the efficient ways of its production, accumulation, and use. But, unfortunately, Sorokin writes, we know less about the energy of love than about light, heat, electricity, and other forms of physical energy. He continues, citing A. H. Maslow: © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 “It is amazing how little the empirical sciences have to offer on the subject of love,” correctly says A. H. Maslow. “Particularly strange is the silence of the psychologists. Sometimes this is merely sad or irritating, as in the case of the textbooks of psychology and sociology, practically none of which treat the subject… More often the situation becomes completely ludicrous. [As a rule] the word ‘love’ is not even indexed [in psychological and sociological works].” (“Love in Happy People,” in Ashley Montagu, ed., The Meaning of Love, pp. 57-58) It is obvious from the Preface that Sorokin will offer no dry academic treatise on love. Much rather, what he offers is an existential quest to discern the nature of love, its creative source, its characteristics in real life and the fruitful practices by which Love is enacted and embodied. Before outlining the flow of the work, he expresses his sense of urgency about researching love’s nature and his commitment to adding to our understanding and practice of love. At the present juncture of human history an increase in our knowledge of the grace of love has become the paramount need of humanity, and an intensive research in this field should take precedence over almost all other studies and research. This present work, together with its companion volume, Forms and Techniques of Altruistic and Spiritual Growth: A Symposium, is my humble contribution to this great objective. Considering the immensity of the task, the contribution is very modest in comparison with the total sum of the necessary studies. Since, however, the better brains are busy with other problems, including the invention of means of extermination of human beings; since educators are largely engrossed in cultivation of the intellect and tribal patriotism of their pupils, while many a religious leader is absorbed in the intertribal crusades against various enemies – under these conditions somebody, somehow, must devote himself to a study of the miracle of love, no matter how inadequate is his capacity to do the work well. Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes. This is my excuse for the innumerable infirmities of this contribution. (xii) The Introduction, “Pitirim Sorokin as Pioneer in the Scientific Study of Unlimited Love,” by Stephen G. Post, gives a portrait of Sorokin’s life which sets his passion and his work in historical context. First, however, he gives a concise summary of Sorokin’s analysis of love. He begins the Introduction with a reference to Sorokin’s life but quickly moves to the summary. A towering figure in twentieth-century sociology, Pitirim A. Sorokin (18891968) was born in Russia, and died near Boston. One might introduce his The Ways and Power of Love with a summary of the author’s life, which would indeed be fascinating. As a young man in Russia, for instance, he © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 was imprisoned first by the Czarists and then by the Bolsheviks, allowing him to conclude that Czarist prison was the more comfortable of the two. After immigrating to the United States in 1923 to teach at the University of Minnesota, he went on to become the founding chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University in 1931 and later established the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism. It is best, however, to reflect on Sorokin’s life only after acquainting the reader with the essential features of his analysis of love. The scope and depth of his analysis, which can only be described as uniquely insightful, will naturally kindle the reader’s curiosity about the man behind these enriching ideas. (p. xv) The Ways and Power of Love was published in 1954 when Sorokin was leading the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In Mortimer J. Adler’s Concepts of Western Thought Series, the philosopher Robert G. Hazo wrote, Sorokin treats love as a separate subject in a treatise devoted exclusively to it. His elaborate discussion and analysis of love, its causes and effects, its human and universal significance, its higher and lower forms, and its implications for other subjects constitute one of the most extensive treatments to be found in the systematic literature about love. The Ways and Power of Love is an ambitious attempt to subject analytical schemes to a phenomenon that Sorokin claims has both a human and a cosmic dimension. (p. xvf) Post relates the rich background of Sorokin in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition. He was, “a creative and idealistic social thinker devoted to scientific observation but with too wide-ranging an intellect to rest content with a purely technical rationality.” The Russian movement sought “integral knowledge,” and included Feodor Dostoyevsky. A close friend of Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, was a special influence on Sorokin. He synthesized philosophy and mysticism in his classic work entitled The Meaning of Love (1894). Solovyov wrote of love and its contrasts: The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute selfconsciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a center of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value. Positively stated, Solovyov described the nature and value of love thus: The meaning and worth of love, as a feeling, is that it really forces us, with all our being to acknowledge for another the same absolute central significance which, because of the power of our egoism, we are conscious © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 of only in our own selves. Love is important not as one of our feelings, but as the transfer of all our interest in life from ourselves to another, as the shifting of the very center of our personal lives. Solovyov, like Sorokin, understood human love as a partial reflection of, and at its heights a participation in, divine love. (p. xvif) According to the Russian movement that sought “Integral Knowledge,” Sorokin analyzed love under seven aspects – the tenets of integral knowledge, which Post summarizes thus: The religious aspect of love identifies it with a Higher Presence, however variously symbolized in the great spiritual and religious traditions; the ethical aspect of love identifies love with goodness itself; the ontological aspect of love defines it as a “unifying, integrating, harmonizing, creative energy or power” that works in the physical, organic, and psychosocial worlds ( p. 6); the physical aspect of love is shown in “all the physical forces that unite, integrate, and maintain the whole inorganic cosmos in endless unities, beginning with the smallest unity of the atom and ending with the whole physical universe as one unified, orderly cosmos” (pp. 8-9); the biological aspect of love is evident in procreation and parental care. The sixth aspect of love is the psychological, and it is here that Sorokin defines love as follows: “In any genuine psychological experience of love, the ego or I of the loving individual tends to merge with and identify itself with the loved Thee. The greater the love, the greater the identification” (p. 10). He views love as a “life-giving force” because of studies showing that people who are altruists live longer than egoists do, although Sorokin does not elaborate. Love is also defined as “the loftiest form of freedom” (p. 11), for where there is love there is no coercion. Sorokin refers to the writings of St. Paul on this point, and was conversant with his Russian contemporary, the theologian Nicholas Berdyaev, who emphasized that love nailed upon a cross compels no one. On the psychological level, Sorokin also notes that love overcomes fear, as exemplified by the life of Gandhi, whom he much admired as a modern saint: “Love does not fear anything or anybody. It cuts off the very roots of fear” (pp. 11-12). In a manner that brings to mind the various spiritual-ethical writings of the contemporary Dali Lama, Sorokin associates love with “the highest peace of mind and happiness (p. 12).” Seventh is the social aspect of love: “on the social plane love is a meaningful interaction – or relationship – between two or more persons where the aspirations and aims of one person are shared and helped in their realization by other persons (p, 13).” (p. xviif) The depth and breadth of Sorokin’s analysis of love is demonstrated by his careful scientific description of love as lived out in human experience, but is not satisfied © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 with such a phenomenological approach. Rather he wrote, “Concentrating on these planes, however, we shall always keep in mind the manifoldness of love as a whole because, without its religious, ethical, and ontological aspects, we cannot truly understand a “visible” part of this cosmos, its psychological, empirical aspects” (p. 14), (p. xviii). Post comments, Methodologically committed to new scientific knowledge that can move our understanding of love forward, he was also attentive to a wider cosmic context and to the fullness of human experience and history. (p. xviii). While Sorokin’s analysis of love, its marks, dimensions, practice in varying groups and disciplines, is painfully thorough and expansive, it is not my intention to go into any depth or breadth of his remarkable analysis. That would be beyond the limits of time and beyond my capacity. What struck me about Sorokin is the combining of careful scientific study along with the realization that such love as he was analyzing and calling for, if the human family is to have a future, must be rooted beyond its surface manifestation that was observable. Here was a serious scientist, a truly great scholar, pointing beyond the limits of empirical research. Yet the love he was researching has been lived out from time to time by truly exceptional human beings. Post notes, Of special interest to Sorokin was the love of figures such as Jesus, Al Hallaj, Damien the Leper, and Gandhi. Persecuted and hated, and therefore without any apparent social source of love energy, they nevertheless were able to maintain a love at high levels in all five dimensions. Such love seems to transcend ordinary human limits; it seems to suggest, argued Sorokin, that some human beings do, through various spiritual and religious practices, participate in a love energy that defines God…. Sorokin was convinced that such perfect or unlimited love can best be explained by hypothesizing an inflow of love from some higher source of love energy that far exceeds that of human beings. One might ask why, after all, we human creatures should arrogantly think that our paltry manifestations of love represent love’s highest expression in the universe of being. Sorokin, following the Russian tradition of integral knowledge, was willing to hypothesize the existence of a higher source of love in the universe in which degrees of human participation are possible. He writes quite metaphysically of the exemplars of love at its fullest, many of whom were despised and had no psychosocial inflow of love to sustain them: The most probable hypothesis for them (and in a much slighter degree for a much larger group of smaller altruists and good neighbors) is that an inflow of love comes from an intangible, littlestudied, possibly supraempirical source called “God,” “the Godhead,” © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 “the Soul of the Universe,” the “heavenly Father,” “Truth,” and so on. (p. xxi). In a section entitled “Creative Personality and the Supraconscious,” Post states that “Sorokin openly asserted a view of human nature that included the supraconscious.” It is at the level of the supraconscious that genuinely creative love resides. Post continues, Of course, Sorokin was running against the grain of the social sciences, with their “materialistic and mechanistic metaphysics” (p. 98), and he therefore felt compelled to “lay down the very minimum of evidence” (p. 98) for the reality of the supraconscious. This evidence, as Sorokin offers it, includes the supraconscious intuition that informs so much of the highest human creativity (and the work of child prodigies) in virtually all fields from mathematics to ethics and religion (ch.6). The perfectly integrated creative genius achieves the highest level of creativity without strenuous effort. In ego-centered love, i.e., love “of low intensity, narrow extensivity, and short duration, impure and inadequate” (p. 125), no supraconscious is involved. However, “quite different seems to be the situation with the supreme forms of creative love – intense, extensive, durable, pure, and adequate. Like supreme creativity in the field of truth or beauty, supreme love can hardly be achieved without a direct participation of the supraconscious and without the ego-transcending techniques of its awakening” (p. 125), italics in original). Sorokin gathers empirical support for this statement from the testimony of “innumerable eminent apostles of love” who, across cultures and generations describe themselves as instruments of the supraconscious: “God, Heaven, Heavenly Father, Tao, the Great Reason, the Oversoul, Brahma, Jen, Chit, the Supre-Essence, the Divine Nothing, the Divine Madness, the Logos, the Sophia, the Supreme Wisdom, the Inner Light” (p. 127). One realizes immediately, reading Sorokin, that this is no ordinary scholarly pursuit; for Sorokin was dealing with the possibility of a human future. Relating something of Sorokin’s life, Post writes, In 1945, anxious over the human condition in the wake of World War II and Hiroshima, he determined to found a program on creative altruism. Here Sorokin’s autobiography, entitled A Long Journey (1963), becomes essential. Sorokin expresses pessimism abut potential political or other attempts to bring abut peace without the “notable altruization of persons, groups, institutions, and culture.” He is hardly sanguine about the role of extrinsic religion, because his own studies indicated that a “purely ideological belief in God or in the credo of any of the great religions” rarely results in more altruistic behavior. He became increasingly interested in investigating “scientifically this unknown or little known energy” of love: “The phenomena of altruistic love were thought to belong to religion and ethics rather than to science. They were considered good topics for © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 preaching but not for research and teaching.” He thought that research grants on the topic of creative, unselfish love would be uniformly rejected by peer reviewers. In a voice that has since been heard by the now rising positive psychology movement of the 1990s, Sorokin noted the tendency of scientists to focus research on the disease model: While may a modern sociologist and psychologist viewed the phenomena of hatred, crime, war, and mental disorders as legitimate objects for scientific study, they quite illogically stigmatized as theological preaching or non-scientific speculation any investigation of the phenomena of love, friendship, heroic deeds, and creative genius. This patently unscientific position of many of my colleagues is merely a manifestation of the prevalent concentration on the negative, pathological, and subhuman phenomena typical of the disintegrating phase of our sensate culture. (p. xxvi) Sorokin recognizes his concern, his passion, was “the stuff of preaching, of theological discourse,” but he had no confidence in religion in the form of institutions or in credal formulation that often not only unite a group but also divide the human family – “purely ideological belief in God” cannot effect the loving community as broad as humanity and finally anything less than that is inadequate to cast the mantle of creative love over humankind. Post points to Sorokin’s final chapter: The final part of the book, Tragedy and Transcendence of Tribal Altruism, consists of a single chapter 23, entitled From Tribal Egoism to Universal Altruism. This is the last and most pessimistic chapter. Sorokin asserts a general law: If unselfish love does not extend over the whole of mankind, if it is confined within one group – a given family, tribe, nation, race, religious denomination, political party, trade union, caste, social class or any part of humanity – such in-group altruism tends to generate an out-group antagonism. And the more intense and exclusive the ingroup solidarity of its members, the more unavoidable are the clashes between the group and the rest of humanity. Herein lies the tragedy of tribal altruism not extended over the whole of mankind or over everyone and all. An exclusive love of one’s own group makes its members indifferent or even aggressive towards other groups and outsiders (p. 459, italics in original) Sorokin’s concern with in-group insularity pervades his writings, especially in his many passages regarding the extent to which apostles of universal love have clashed with tribalists and been imprisoned, banished, tortured, and killed. But in addition to exemplars of unlimited love for all humanity, innumerable groups have themselves been destroyed by the collective egoism of group loyalty. As Sorokin writes, “Whether in the form © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 of a cold or a hot war, this intergroup warfare has gone on incessantly in human history, and has filled its annals with the most deadly, most bloody, and most shameful deeds of Homo sapiens” (p. 461). In-group exclusivism has “killed more human beings and destroyed more cities and villages than all the epidemics, hurricanes, storms, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions taken together. It has brought upon mankind more suffering than any other catastrophe” (p. 461). Religious, ethnic, tribal, caste, and class wars have thus far defined much of human history and experience. What is needed, argues Sorokin, is enhanced extensivity. His recommendation is that the power of hatred be focused on threats to the whole of mankind, such as disease, ignorance, and poverty. He also recommends that competitions be sponsored on the basis of new values: “Unselfish love and humility can successfully be one of the most important competitive values” (p. 468). Indeed, humility was a core value in Sorokin’s approach to a better human future. (pp. xxiiif). Sorokin writes about love but he is not a sentimentalist. He is painfully aware of the violence that has marked the human story. Neither is he naïve. He faces honestly the terrible blood-soaked history of humanity. He writes, “Imperialistic” encroachments of any selfish group are opposed, first of all by all persons whose love behavior extends over other groups and especially over the whole of humanity. They cannot approve aggressive misdeeds of an exclusive tribal loyalty. Their universal or more extensive love cannot help clashing with the narrow, tribal love of the group. Hence the conflict between such persons and the group. Hence the persecution of such individuals by the group. Hence the tragic martyrdom of the apostles of universal love, who have been condemned to death, imprisoned, banished, tortured, and variously persecuted by the partisans of tribal loyalty. Socrates, Jesus, St. Peter, St. Paul, Al Hallaj, Gandhi and some 37 per cent of the saintly Christian altruists are eminent examples of its victims. The total number of the martyrs of tribal patriotism of various political, ethnic, racial, religious, economic, occupational, and other collectivities with exclusive in-group solidarity has been enormous in human history. Jesus well understood this clash between the two types, and the persecution of the universal altruists by the tribal ones, when he said to his disciples: “And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake….” “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.” Almost any universal altruist is bound to become a “subversive enemy” to be persecuted by the “patriotic” tribal altruists. In this sense the eternal tragedy of the agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi continues in human history unabated. The tribal patriots of “the Athenian Committee on un-Athenian Activities” condemned to death Socrates; “the Jewish Committee on un-Jewish Activities” crucified Jesus; © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 “the Muslim Committee on un-Muslim Activities” quartered and burned Al Hallaj; the self-appointed guardians of Hindu Orthodoxy shot Gandhi for his “un-Orthodox” activities. The annals of history are sprinkled with the blood of altruistic “heretics and schismatics” put to death by the tribal “orthodox” religions; indeed, each page of these annals is soaked in the blood of altruistic “subversives” executed by the tribal state governments. Most of the political parties, racial occupational, national, and other groups have been guilty in persecution of their “disloyal” members whose “disloyalty” consisted exactly in extension of their love far beyond the boundaries of the respective organization. And so this drama is continued up to this day when a multitude of “patriotic governments” and “crusading committees” relentlessly persecute many a “disloyal” altruist in the name of Communist, Socialist, Liberal, Conservative, Fascist, Democratic, Capitalist, Labor, Atheist, Religious, and other tribal solidarities and lilliputian in-group patriotisms. And so far, no end of this tragedy is visible. (p. 459f) That was published in 1954 and the half-century since has only been an exclamation point to Sorokin’s sad portrait. But he will not yield to despair and hopelessness. The vast variety of human beings, of such different orientations, cultural differences, traditional formation, religious understanding – in a word, everything that uniquely marks individuals, groups, tribes, nations is not the cause of aggression, violence, warfare and bloodshed. Rather, Sorokin asserts, History exhibits to us thousands of dissimilar families and millions of heterogeneous persons who have at various periods peacefully lived side by side in mutual harmony. If dissimilarity were the cause of interpersonal and intergroup conflicts, such a peaceful coexistence of heterogeneous individuals and collectivities would have been impossible. If it has occurred many times, as it undoubtedly has, then the real cause of the warfare lies not in these differentiations, but in something else – namely, in the poison of tribal selfishness that infiltrated in the differentiated societies and their members. This poison consists exactly of the restricted extensity and exclusiveness of their tribal love or solidarity. If this hypothesis is correct, then the disease can be cured only by extension of solidarity or love to include everyone and all. This extension does not require elimination of all interpersonal and intergroup dissimilarities. It requires only a thorough cleaning of individuals and groups from the poison of exclusive selfishness. (p. 463) Perhaps now the reader will shake her head and write the author off as an impossible dreamer. But Sorokin will not falter before the seeming impossible dream. Rather, he continues, If this diagnosis is correct, can the prescription of the universal love be carried through? Can one indeed love equally every human being, the © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 strangers and the enemies as much as the members of his family and friends? Is not such love a biological and psychological impossibility? Taken literally, the prescription is impossible for the overwhelming majority of human beings; however, the extension of love over the whole of mankind neither means nor requires an equal distribution of love among all human beings. At its initial stage it means three things: first, that everyone loves the members of his family and the limited circle of his friends and acquaintances as his special part of humanity chosen by and entrusted to him for this purpose. If everyone does so, every member of the human race will find himself loving and loved by the members of his special groups. Under such conditions not a single person in the whole human population remains unloved and not loving. Second, universal love means that everyone must abstain from all actions harmful to any human being. Through this neminem laidere in the whole human race nobody remains hated, harmed, and seriously mistreated by other human beings. Third, it means that everyone, within his capacity, extends his loving hand beyond his special group to everybody who is in need of help and warm sympathy – first of all, in one’s immediate community and second, in the whole human universe. If everybody does so in regard to the persons in his own community, then every human being will find the needed loving help from his community. If each community does the same in regard to other communities in need of help, then the whole human population will be blessed by, at least, the minimum of love and vital help. Under these conditions in the whole mankind there will be found not a single person lonely, forsaken, unloved, or unhelped. This extension of love can be done privately and publicly, in individual and social forms. If now and then it requires sacrifice on the part of the individual and his group, such sacrifice is to be gladly given. If every person and group do so, these sacrifices will be repaid by other individuals and groups when the sacrificing persons and groups are in need of help. Viewed so, the sacrifices are but a form of a mutual insurance of all human beings against possible insecurity and misfortune. Such is the meaning of the universal love at its initial stage. It is easily seen that it does not contain anything utopian or impossible. At this stage it represents but a development of the existing “network of love,” and an increased inhibition of the interhuman aggression. Once established in this initial form, it will in the course of time and practice spontaneously develop into ever richer, nobler, and more perfect universal love. If wisely guided and earnestly executed, the initial phase of universal love can be achieved without serious difficulty and at a much cheaper cost in the terms of death, suffering, and destruction, than the price to be paid in this sort of “money” for continuation of tribal loyalties and tribal warfare. Within the life cycle of one or two generations this phase will bring mankind much closer to the ideal of security, brotherhood, and peace on the earth, than the leaders and followers of tribal patriotisms have been © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 able to do for millennia or can do in the future. Here are some of the practical prescriptions as to what the first steps of realization of the universal solidarity should consist in, and how they should be carried through, to bring mankind nearer to this objective. (pp. 463-464) Nothing utopian or impossible here, Sorokin claims and he is surely right. We have become so pessimistic, so despairing. So easily we simply throw up our hands and don’t even take seriously such an impossible dream. But might that not be because we are mired in our own present experience of a world at war, of violence and aggression, of the vast treasure spent on armaments, of terrorism and “the war on terror?” But what about the long view, the evolutionary drama that has seen the emergence of the human, of consciousness, of the recognition that at the core of the human is an empathy that is triggered by human suffering, human pathos, human tenderness, human beauty? The summer of 2010 I tackled Jeremy Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization whose subtitle is “The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis.” I have been struck by how much Rifkin’s claim that empathy is at the core of the human reflects Sorokin’s belief that love is the core of the human because it is the core of reality – the supraconscious, however named, pouring out love’s energy in limitless supply. (I was also amazed that Sorokin’s name does not appear in the index nor The Ways and Power of Love in the bibliography!) Here is Rifkin: Historians, by and large, write about social conflict and wars, great heroes and evil wrongdoers, technological progress and the exercise of power, economic injustices and the redress of social grievances. When historians touch on philosophy, it is usually in relationship to the disposition of power. Rarely do we hear of the other side of the human experience that speaks to our deeply social nature and the evolution and extension of human affection and its impact on culture and society. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel once remarked that happiness is “the blank pages of history” because they are “periods of harmony.” Happy people generally live out their existence in the “microworld” of close familial relations and extended social affiliations. History, on the other hand, is more often than not made by the disgruntled and discontented, the angry and rebellious – those interested in exercising authority and exploiting others and their victims, interested in righting wrongs and restoring justice. By this reckoning, much of the history that is written is about the pathology of power. Perhaps that is why, when we come to think about human nature, we have such a bleak analysis. Our collective memory is measured in terms of crises and calamities, harrowing injustices, and terrifying episodes of © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 brutality inflicted on each other and our fellow creatures. But if these were the defining elements of human experience, we would have perished as a species long ago. All of which raises the question “Why have we come to think of life in such dire terms?” The answer is that tales of misdeeds and woe surprise us. They are unexpected and, therefore, trigger alarm and heighten our interest. That is because such events are novel and not the norm, but they are newsworthy and for that reason they are the stuff of history. Today, our twenty-four hour cable TV news shows become the chroniclers of the accounts of pathological behavior, bombarding us with tales of horror and woe. The everyday world is quite different. Although life as it’s lived on the ground, close to home, is peppered with suffering, stresses, injustices, and foul play, it is, for the most part, lived out in hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity. Comfort and compassion between people creates goodwill, establishes the bonds of sociality, and gives joy to people’s lives. Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is our core nature. Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization. In short, it is the extraordinary evolution of empathic consciousness that is the quintessential underlying story of human history, even if it has not been given the serious attention it deserves by our historians. (The Empathic Civilization, p. 10) Rifkin criticized the historians for focusing on “crises and calamities, harrowing injustices and terrifying episodes of brutality inflicted on each other and our fellow creatures” while Sorokin makes a very similar criticism of the field of psychology. This is what he wrote over half a century ago: MAIN BLUNDERS OF THE PREVALENT THEORIES The ultimate task of these studies is to find out the efficient ways of making persons more creative and altruistic. In order that this purpose may be fruitfully advanced, one has to have an adequate theory of the mental structure of human personality and of the energies generated in and operating through the human organism. The prevalent theories in this field are grossly defective. The first of the blunders consists of merging into the category of the “unconscious” or “subconscious” (E. von Hartmann, P. Janet, S. Freud, and others) two radically different energies of man: the biologically unconscious that lies below the level of the conscious state of mind and the supraconscious (“genius,” “creative élan,” “divine inspiration,” etc.) that lies above the level of any conscious and rational thought or energy. The “depth psychology” of the prevalent theories of personality is in fact quite shallow. It either flattens the mental structure almost exclusively to the level of the unconscious or subconscious, with a sort of epiphenomenal and vague © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 “ego” and “superego,” or just depicts it as a “two-story building” – the unconscious (subconscious) and the conscious (rational). In harmony with the negativistic character of the disintegrating Sensate culture, the prevalent theories of personality also move mainly in the region of the “social sewers.” They see mainly the lowest form of man’s energies (the unconscious and subconscious) and are blind to man’s highest supraconscious genius. They emphasize man’s animal, sadistic, and masochistic tendencies and pass by man’s sublime, creative, and altruistic properties. They interpret the highest creative élan as a mere biological reflex or drive; the sublimest sacrifice as masochistic tendency; the noblest inspiration as this or that subnormal complex; the genius as an abnormal neurotic; and the saint as a doubtful “deviant.” ( p. 83) Anticipating Rifkin’s claim of empathy at the core of the human, Sorokin declared the power of creative love and took note of the widespread contrary views. In the atmosphere of our Sensate culture we are prone to believe in the power of the struggle for existence, selfish interests, egoistic competition, hate, the fighting instinct, sex drives, the instinct of death and destruction, all-powerful economic factors, rude coercion and other negativistic forces. Yet we are highly skeptical in regard to the power of creative love, disinterested service, unprofitable sacrifice, mutual aid, the call of pure duty and other positive forces. The prevalent theories of evolution and progress, of the dynamic forces of history, of the dominant factors of human behavior, of the “how” and “why” of social processes unanimously stress such negativistic factors as the above. They view them as the main determinants of historical events and of the individual life courses. Marxism and the economic interpretation of history; Freudianism and its libidinal-destructive explanation of human behavior; instinctivist, behaviorist, and physiosomatic theories of personality and culture; Darwinistic and biological theories of the struggle for existence as the main factor of biological, mental, and moral evolution; even the prevalent motto of the chambers of commerce that “rivalry and competition made America great” – these and similar theories dominate contemporary sociology, economics, psychology, psychiatry, biology, anthropology, philosophy of history, political science, and other social and humanistic disciplines. These ideologies have an enormous appeal to the prevalent Sensate mind, are eagerly believed by Sensate man, and are considered by him as “the last word in modern science.” In contrast to that, Sensate minds emphatically disbelieve the power of love, sacrifice, friendship, co-operation, the call of duty, unselfish search for truth, goodness, and beauty. These appear to us as something epiphenomenal and illusory. We call them “rationalizations,” “selfdeceptions,” “derivations,” “beautifying ideologies,” “opiates of the people’s mind,” “smoke screens,” “idealistic bosh,” “unscientific delusion,” © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 etc. We are biased against all theories that try to prove the power of love…. (p. 47) Rifkin very astutely prefaces his monumental study with a full account of December 24, 1914, on Flanders Field – Christmas Eve, the German and English troops in their trenches thirty to fifty yards from each other. The Germans lighted candles on Christmas trees brought to them and began to sing carols – “Stille Nacht”…from the British trenches arose a response – “Silent Night.” You have heard the story – by morning it is estimated up to 100,000 soldiers came out of their trenches, met in the middle between the lines, sharing Christmas greetings, showing photos of their families, sharing cigarettes and sweets, telling where their home was – a fully human moment. In the morning news of the event filtered back to the command centers, and the soldiers were ordered back to their trenches to take up again the awful conflict. I cannot read that account without a lump in my throat because it is such a beautiful human moment, redolent with the presence of God – on Christmas Eve, the Prince of Peace. Rifkin says it well: Yet what transpired in the battlefields of Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 between tens of thousands of young men had nothing to do with original sin or productive labor. And the pleasure those men sought in each other’s company bore little resemblance to the superficial rendering of pleasure offered up by nineteenth-century utilitarians and even less to Freud’s rather pathological account of a human race preoccupied by the erotic impulse. The men at Flanders expressed a far deeper human sensibility – one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence and that transcends the portals of time and the exigencies of whatever contemporary orthodoxy happens to rule. We need only ask ourselves why we feel so heartened at what these men did. They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another. Rifkin introduces his startling claim with the incident of Christmas Eve, 1914, because it is a powerful witness to his central thesis. Interestingly, Sorokin, as I have indicated, opens his Preface with three of Jesus’ Beatitudes: Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God. In his discussion of the aspects of love, the final aspect is the social aspect. He defines it and then cites another section of the Sermon on the Mount. Finally, on the social plane love is a meaningful interaction – or relationship – between two or more persons where the aspirations and © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 aims of one person are shared and helped in their realization by other persons. A loving person not only does not hinder the realization of the wise aims of the loved person but positively helps it. So far as he helps, he does not cause pain or sorrow to the loved person, but increases his happiness. It is the joy of giving and the joy of receiving; it is fulfilling oneself in others and by others. The terms “solidarity,” “mutual aid,” “cooperation,” “unity of good neighbors,” “familistic relationship,” and the like denote various forms of love as social relationship. Its highest forms are magnificently defined in the Sermon on the Mount. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. Agree with thine adversary quickly. First be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift [to the altar]. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. These norms outline the social relationships of love at their highest and best. (p. 13) Sorokin quotes these verses because he is explaining the social aspect of love. But, to my mind, even more remarkable, indeed the epitome of what both Rifkin and Sorokin are pointing to, is expressed in the paragraph calling us to love for enemies. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. As we have noted above, this is precisely what Sorokin calls for as the only cure for our human malady – …the disease can be cured only by “the extension of love to include everyone and all.” Jesus calls us to be God-like. Matthew uses the word teleios which is translated “perfect.” That is an accurate translation but I think a bit misleading. Are we not quick to declare, “Nobody’s perfect!” The Greek word © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 points to fulfilling one’s purpose, realizing one’s end. I prefer the word “mature.” Is that not what so often we fail to be? Our conception of God as perfect, yes, but being mature. Perfection tends to scare us I think; it has an edge. Whereas in the context of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is saying, “Be mature.” One might even suggest Jesus say, “Grow up!” In Luke’s Gospel, the word oiktirmones is used, translated “compassionate,” which also works well but I prefer Matthew’s choice – be mature because maybe indeed that is what is happening to humankind over the aeons of time. The movement from the hunter tribes of early humans to herders and farmers has been underway for millenia. And we surely are dismayed by the ongoing mayhem we create in the human family. Ongoing militarism, brutal dictators holding their people with iron grip in fear of expressing their longing for freedom and a decent human existence, weapons of mass destruction at the ready, a flourishing arms industry, the perfecting of ever smarter more lethal weapons systems – drones that can kill half a world away. In light of all of that are Rifkin and Sorokin simple idle dreamers? An even more poignant question I would pose for you – was Jesus simply a good person who really didn’t get it? Wrestling with a major work such as Sorokin’s The Ways and Power of Love is no easy task. Trying to follow his intensive analysis of creative love and its application to the human situation is not summer reading lite, fit for a beach chair. But, as I struggled to get my head around his analysis and its implications and applications, there was another presence of which I was aware throughout and that was the presence of Jesus. If you have been with me for some time you have probably heard me confess that I did not know what to do with the Sermon on the Mount; not the Beatitudes, not the turning of the cheek, and certainly not the love of enemies. Rifling my old files I found once I did a series on the passage – probably 35 or 40 years ago. At that time I was locked into orthodox Reformed theology with a heavy dose of pietism. The center of my faith and my preaching was the atonement – Christ’s death in our place whereby our sin is forgiven and heaven’s gate is open. Then the Christian, thus “saved,” was called to a life of righteousness, of goodness and mercy; indeed, one was to love one’s neighbor and, because Jesus said so, love one’s enemy. But the broader context was a world unredeemed that would only be transformed at the coming again of Jesus Christ in glory to judge the world, claiming his own and giving their just reward to those who had not bowed their knee to Him. This was the scheme of world history moving toward the end, the damning of the wicked” and the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount was a blueprint for the life of a Christian but we “knew” world history, human development would not emerge as the Kingdom of God about which Jesus spoke. © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 I will not burden you with the long journey that has brought me to where I am today. I also want to say the faith and piety of my early years produced generations of really good human beings, sincere, faithful, generous, compassionate. In no way do I denigrate the community in which I was shaped, formed and given a deep sense of God’s love and grace that is with me still. Neither will I attempt to portray the whole vision of faith by which I now live and how the old understanding has given way to the new. Only this I will say; moving from an atonement centered theology, I came to see Jesus as dying the way he died because he lived the way he lived. Speaking truth to power, he was killed through the collusion of church and state. I do not understand him calling people into the kingdom that was imminent, forsaking “the world,” awaiting his reappearing to bring history to its consummation. I see him rather calling people to a new way to live in order that the will of God would be done on earth as it is in heaven. In contrast to my questions about the Beatitudes, about turning the other cheek, about loving one’s enemies, I now see Jesus as dead serious. He was calling people to live a life of love, of compassion, of non-violence, of peacemaking – not until God’s last dramatic act to end history with all its darkness and bring in the Kingdom from beyond. This earth, this history, this human family are the subjects of Jesus’ calling to live here and now the life of the Kingdom of God. Jesus was serious; he meant it when he spoke of human behavior, human encounters, human beings under the imperative to love all and everyone. This is what Sorokin affirmed. It is what Rifkin sees emerging. And think of the lives that have been world-transforming – Jesus himself and in his steps the Hindu Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among others. Recently I read a marvelous book portraying the life and business of Warren Buffett. Related there is the time Buffett heard Martin Luther King speak. Finally King strode to the podium, dressed in his preacher’s robes. He had chosen the theme of “Remaining Awake During a Revolution,” and his resonant voice rang out with a quote from poet James Russell Lowell’s “The Present Crisis”, the anthem of the civil-rights movement. The Scaffold Sways the Future Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne: Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow Keeping watch above His own. © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 He spoke of the meaning of suffering. Inspired to nonviolent resistance by Gandhi, King invoked the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the persecuted, it said, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. … Buffett had always responded to powerful, charismatic orators. Now he saw King standing before him: moral courage in the flesh, a man who had been beaten and imprisoned, put in shackles and sentenced to hard labor, stabbed and clubbed for his beliefs, a man who had carried a movement on the strength of his ideas for nearly a decade despite enraged opposition, violence, and limited success. King had once described the power of nonviolence, which “has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience…. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that some things are so precious, that there are some things so dear, some things so eternally worthful, that they are worth dying for. If an individual has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. When one discovers this, there is power in this method.” (The Snowball, p. 304) Buffett was struck by a statement which King repeated often: “The laws are not to change the heart, but to restrain the heartless.” As I stated above, immersed in Sorokin, I was so conscious of the presence of Jesus, of the spirit of the one whose call to a way of love, nonviolence and peace I failed to grasp in my early ministry and only gradually, haltingly have come to see as the way to life. This is not the stuff of preaching. It is not something I can explain and advocate and you can hear and accept. Too often preaching pleads and people resist or preaching declares and the critical faculties are alerted to question. No, to find the way of Jesus compelling, to determine however poorly to follow, to commit oneself to the way of non-violence and peace – that is the stuff of witness. To that I witness and invite you to wonder about it. Love is at the core of reality, the creative center of the cosmos. The grain of the universe is Love. It is to love we are called everyday in every way to one and all. It is the Way of Jesus for me, a very concrete way to which I am called, which I betray and fail miserably to fulfill. Yet a way I will not deny or rationalize away; a way I will self-consciously cultivate because it compels me. I choose that way and will not give up in spite of falling so far short. Love is the answer to the world’s violence, to humanity’s disease and finally Love will prevail because there can be no doubt, Love wins. This I believe. © Grand Valley State University �Love at the Core: The Grain of the Universe Richard A. Rhem July 17, 2011 References: Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Tarcher, 2009. Pitirim A. Sorokin. The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation. Originally published in 1954; Reprint: Templeton Foundation Press, 2002. © Grand Valley State University � https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/e584f4aa2c22868031d42cf069823306.m4v e90909d44f982b6176b9cbc65603d121 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Center Gathering Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization. Tarcher, 2009, Pitirim A. Sorokin. The Ways and Power of Love: Types, Factors, and Techniques of Moral Transformation. Orig. published, 1954, Reprint, Templeton Foundation Press, 2002. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20110717 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-07-17 Title A name given to the resource Love At the Core: The Grain of the Universe Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Moving Image Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 17, 2011 entitled "Love At the Core: The Grain of the Universe", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Center Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource video/x-m4v application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Sermon on the Mount Transforming Love https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4ec6f26d9d07bcc2d2fa2f58132d1307.pdf 14298fb0bce6823f1729c0c3f7a21ac2 PDF Text Text Bread amd Wine: A Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Many Generations of a Family Gathered for Independence Day at their Family Home Psalm 16:5-11; I Corinthians 13:8-13; John 1:14-18 Richard A. Rhem Spring Lake, Michigan July 4, 2011 Some of the best memories of my ministry are of moments experienced here in this place and with this family. Countless gatherings around the kitchen table with coffee, cookies and nutty M&Ms. Visits during Thelma’s illness and eventually as she lay in the hospital bed in the family room with many of you present. The sacrament of baptism celebrated for the rising fourth generation – or in my ministry, the fifth generation for I too had the privilege of being pastor to Gerrit and Jo, Neal and Alice in their respective homes. In these past weeks as I’ve stopped by I have realized, Marvin, that life’s load has become heavy, more difficult to carry. Perhaps I’ve sensed a bit of weariness. Not to your liking, the Life Alert system is installed and the keys of the red Ford truck no longer a part of your daily routine, although dear Joanne does drive you around often, stopping at the drive-in window of Temptations for ice cream (Life still has its little pleasures). The last time I was here you asked when the old Christ Community group would celebrate communion again. I had thought perhaps last month but we were not able to arrange it. Your question made me realize your hunger for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper – Holy Communion. The bread and wine that over your lifetime has been for you the sign and symbol of our Christian faith – the body and the blood through which we experience our Lord's life and death and are strengthened and refreshed as we follow the way of Jesus. Thus I wanted to satisfy that hunger one more time and what better community in which to celebrate Holy Communion than in the gathering of your loving family – a loving family because you, Marvin, and your beloved Thelma learned love in your respective families and you in turn with your beloved Thelma created a community of love for your six children and their children and their children’s children, all of that arising from the embodiment of the love of God in Jesus – the strong tradition of Christian faith that has marked this family. Yesterday as I was preparing for this family service, I went to my funeral file and took out the service I led for Thelma on June 23, 2001. There was an eloquent © Grand Valley State University   �Bread & Wine: Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 2   testimony to the treasure of family. I’m not certain who put together this litany of remembrance, but it captures the richness of a family immersed in love. Our Grandma, Our Guardian We’ll forever remember the child in you… baseball games in the field, thread spool necklaces, making sand castles, playing Husker Du, your animated dreams, and under-dogs that seemed to push us to the sky. We’ll always treasure our outings together… picking berries, ice skating and mini golf, taking us swimming, outings to Russ’, and drives around the Oval with a stop at Miss Lisa’s. We’ll always remember your mindful sayings… “walk and think”, “Lord give me patience and give it to me right now”, “Oh Marv” and countless others. We’ll sorely miss the cook in you… cookies from the icebox, your world-renowned muffins, pork barbecue on Christmas Eve, and enough pies at Thanksgiving to cover the kitchen table. We’ll always remember the gardener in you… potting plants with us, eating vegetables straight out of the garden, and the care that went into every turn of the John Deere. We’ll forever cherish the caregiver in you… the countless times picking us up for school because we missed the bus, protecting us from Grampa’s endless teasing, the old-fashioned home remedies for everything, correcting exaggerated stories, your honest advice and candor to help us see our paths more clearly. We’ll forever admire the homemaker in you… stiff towels right off the clothesline, the butter on the ham sandwiches, cookies and coffee at your kitchen table, the multiple pairs of knitted mittens and slippers, the love that was sewn into each of our quilts, the iron always being warm, the sheet over the davenport, homemade strawberry jam, and the way you provided a warm gathering place. We’ll always carry on the traditions you’ve established… the best Easter egg hunts ever, Christmas stockings for all thirteen of us, the most famous picnic coordinator on the block, decorating Christmas cookies, playing piano for the Bottema Choir on Christmas Eve, five dollar bills in birthday cards, fireworks, sharing old treasures and reliving old stories. For always being an inspiring role model as a mother, wife and devout Christian, we thank you. And as you continue on and become our Guardian Angel, we say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” © Grand Valley State University �Bread & Wine: Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 3   To be sure, Marvin, that was written about Thelma, mother, grandmother, great grandmother par excellence. But you have been a vital partner, gramps, in that endeavor. And the fact that the family continues to gather on holidays, on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, jammed into a house too small, a room too small, is testimony to the degree to which love and care still mark this family. You are its rock, its compelling center. I went through the wonderful liturgy of that service and found that what I want to say today I’ve said before. The Scripture lessons are the same. The title of my meditation for Thelma was “A Love Shaped Face” – pretty well chosen I would say. And the lessons bear repeating. Psalm 16:8: “I keep the Lord always before my face.” Because he kept the Lord before his face, the Psalmist said, he would not be moved. Constancy, strength, resoluteness – those are the fruits of living before God’s face. Faithfulness, dependability, consistency – those are the marks of this family and I submit to you that is not an accident; it is the fruit of living faithfully before the face of God, in trust, in goodness, in love. Love. John’s Gospel tells the Christmas story in one line: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And so in the Word become flesh (or human), we see the face of God. In verse 18, he writes: No one has ever seen God. It is God’s only Son…who has made him known. In his familiar and well-loved chapter on love, St. Paul writes a description of love as the highest gift of the Holy Spirit. But then he acknowledges that in our present human experience we see dimly: For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. To live in love is the highest human possibility but as long as we are on our human journey we will wonder, struggle, sometimes despair of making sense of it all. But this is not the last word – …now dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully. This is movingly expressed in the funeral folder I have from Thelma’s funeral. I’m not sure who chose it; I suspect it was a family choice. It could not be more appropriate and I think it is appropriate to be reminded of it today as we celebrate Holy Communion on the holiday when we celebrate The Declaration of Independence. I’ve entitled my meditation today “Bread and Wine: A Sacrament of Dependence and Hope.” © Grand Valley State University �Bread & Wine: Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 4   It is one thing to celebrate national independence for which we give thanks. But that is not the celebration we are engaged in here. Rather it is the total dependence on the good and gracious God who is our rock, our strong foundation enabling us to be confident that we shall not be moved. It is the celebration of the way of Jesus, the way of love, the way that cost him his life. But in bread broken and wine poured out we remember, we find our hope and we know in our dependence on God we will be kept in love, confident that, though now we see dimly, there is coming a day when we shall see face to face. Thus let me say as clearly as I can to us all and especially to you, Marvin, feeling the infirmities of the flesh – The best is yet to be. Listen to the Parable from Thelma’s funeral folder and know that she is present even now, here and now… A Parable A young Mother set her foot on the path of life. “Is the way long?” she asked. And her guide said: “Yes. And the way is hard. But the end will be better than the beginning.” But the young Mother was happy, and she would not believe that anything could be better than these years. So she played with her children, and gathered flowers for them along the way: and the sun shown on them, and life was good. The young Mother cried, “Nothing will ever be lovelier than this.” The night came and storm, and the path was dark, and the children shook with fear and cold, and the Mother drew them close and covered them with her mantle, and the children said, “Mother, we are not afraid for you are near, and no harm can come.” The Mother said, “This is better than the brightness of day, for I have taught my children courage.” And the morning came, and there was a hill ahead. The children climbed and grew weary, and the Mother was weary, but at all times she said to the children, “A little patience, and we are there.” So the children climbed, and when they reached the top, they said, “We could not have done it without you, Mother.” The Mother, when she lay down that night, looked up at the stars and said, “This is a better day than the last…for my children have learned fortitude in the face of hardness.” © Grand Valley State University �Bread & Wine: Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 5   And the next day came strange clouds which darkened the earth – clouds of war and hate and evil, and the children groped and stumbled, and the Mother said, “Look up. Life you eyes to the Light.” And the children looked and saw above the clouds the Everlasting Glory, and it guided them and brought them beyond the darkness. That night the Mother said, “This is the best day of all, for I have shown my children God.” And the days went on, and the weeks and the months and the years, and the Mother grew old, and she was tired and weary. But her Children were tall and strong, and walked with courage. And when the way was hard they helped their Mother and when the way was rough, they lifted and carried her; and at last they came to a hill, and beyond the hill they could see a shining road and golden gates flung wide. And the Mother said, “I have reached the end of my journey. And now I know that the end is better than the beginning, for my children walk alone, and their children after them.” And the children said, “You will always walk with us, Mother, even when you have gone through the gates.” And they stood and watched her as she went on alone, and gates closed after her. They said, “We cannot see her, but she is with us still. A Mother like ours is more than a Memory. She is a living Presence.” © Grand Valley State University �Bread & Wine: Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Richard A. Rhem The Prayer Oh God, whose mercies are new every morning, whose faithfulness is great, and whose grace washes over us in wave upon wave, to You we lift up our hearts, longing for the experience of your Presence which is healing and refreshing. On this beautiful day as the nation is celebrating our independence, as a family we celebrate our dependence – our dependence on your grace that holds us steady in the movement of our days, your grace that has kept us as a family together in love and care. And especially, we give you thanks for the patriarch in our midst, father, grandfather, great grandfather, the one whose steady presence keeps us steady, whose faith has shown us the way, whose welcoming love keeps us coming back and coming together. We are grateful, O God, that once more we can gather here, be together and celebrate the holiday. But even more today, we gather around another table, the table of our Lord. In the presence of the symbols of bread broken and wine poured out we are brought back to the heart of things, to that which really matter, to your love, your grace. Be present to us as we are present to You and one another– touch us deeply, hold us securely, manifest to us that Love that is at the center of all things. Spirit of God, make this bread and wine for us the body and blood of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us as we pray the prayer he taught us, saying, “Our Father, …” © Grand Valley State University Page 6   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Independence Day Celebration of a Family Scripture Text Psalm 16:5-11, I Corinthians 13:8-13, John 1:14-18 Location The location of the interview A Family Home Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20110704 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-07-04 Title A name given to the resource Bread and Wine: A Sacrament of Dependence and Hope Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 4, 2011 entitled "Bread and Wine: A Sacrament of Dependence and Hope", on the occasion of Independence Day Celebration of a Family, at A Family Home. Scripture references: Psalm 16:5-11, I Corinthians 13:8-13, John 1:14-18. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Holy Communion Independence Day https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/279225bf1f9d8d23182dc06b43f3ab60.pdf 8c7f6a08632c89f5939fd2093a47fd1c PDF Text Text The Way of Jesus: The Road Not Taken Mark 8:31-9:1 Richard A. Rhem St. John’s Episcopal Church Grand Haven, Michigan April 10, 2011 During Lent, 2002, I preached a sermon series entitled “Journeying With Jesus on the Road Less Traveled.” As is the case in this meditation I take the image of the road from Robert Frost’s arresting poem, “The Road Not Taken.” In the 2002 series I was painting the portrait of Jesus as he made his way from Galilee, through Samaria, finally to arrive at Jerusalem, the entry into Jerusalem that we celebrate next Sunday, Palm Sunday. As I went back to the poem again I find I probably missed the poet’s meaning. He opens with : Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And, sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler,… Contrary to the advice of Yogi Berra, when one comes to a fork in the road one cannot take it! One must choose. If you look a second time at the poem, the poet is playing with us. In stanzas two and three he tells us the paths are equally fair, and neither trodden by passers by. Finally, in the final verse, 4, he writes, Two roads diverged in a wood, and I.. I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. But by his own description neither road was less traveled. Perhaps he is foreseeing a time when he will seek to explain his life, maybe rationalize a bit and suggest he took a road less traveled, thus explaining his life’s course. But, however one interprets the poem, the poem is not the point except to say that in 2002 I was describing Jesus’ way and thus I think I was legitimate in describing it as a “road less traveled.” But this evening my focus is different and so I use the title of the poem – “The Road Not Taken” because in this meditation it is my claim that the way of Jesus is the way not taken – not taken by the church that bears his name. © Grand Valley State University   �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 2   That is a serious charge but I believe it is tragically true. This 2000 year old institution that looks to Jesus as its Lord and Savior has failed to follow in his way. The evening Gospel – Mark 8:31 – 9:1 is the first of three predictions of Jesus’ imminent passion and resurrection. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. I’m quite sure Jesus did not sit his disciples down and inform them as Mark puts it, Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:31) Nonetheless, that Jesus was clear-eyed and fully aware of the road he was traveling and the inevitable consequences cannot be doubted. He lived with intentionality from his baptism. The Gospel of John has its own way of telling Jesus’ story but the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all move from Jesus’ baptism by John with the affirmation from heaven, the temptations, to the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The intention is obvious – to indicate that Jesus had a sense of calling, wrestled with how to execute that calling (the Temptation narrative) and inaugurated his ministry of grace and healing in what has been called the Galilean Springtime. The opening chapters of Mark document that healing ministry. Then we come to the transition in the narrative – our lesson this evening. It is preceded by Jesus’ question to the disciples who had witnessed his miraculous ministry of healing, feeding the thousands – “Who do people say that I am?” They respond, “Some say John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the prophets.” Then the crunch question: But who do you say that I am? On behalf of the disciples, Peter responds, You are the Messiah. This is a very familiar scene but more often we take Matthew’s account (Matthew 16:13-20) which has Jesus commending Peter – in fact, giving him the nickname Petros (Peter), meaning Rock. Mark’s account is briefer and, rather than affirming Peter, Jesus moves immediately to “sternly warn them not to tell anyone about him.” Then follows our lesson, the key verse, 31, pointing to the way of suffering, rejection and death ahead. Peter, once again the spokesperson for the disciples, “rebukes” Jesus – a strong word used by Mark. Peter doesn’t want to hear about the darkness ahead. Matthew quotes him, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 3   happen to you!” Now it is Peter’s turn to be rebuked by Jesus: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” What is going on here? We must remind ourselves that each Gospel writer was dealing with concrete historical happenings – the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. But each writer was also creating the story, framing the meaning and significance of Jesus. Mark has given a picture of Jesus’ ministry and now is about to create a new section of the Gospel – the journey to Jerusalem which culminated in Jesus’ entry to the city that is celebrated on Palm Sunday, which inaugurates what the church calls Holy Week. A study of Mark’s gospel convinces me that Mark is telling the story of Jesus, in which he reveals the failure of the disciples to understand what Jesus was really all about. In a word, I would contend, according to Mark, the disciples didn’t get it! As I claim above, the respective Gospel writers had their own peculiar slant on the Jesus event. For Mark a prominent theme was the blindness of the disciples and Jesus’ continual attempt to prepare them for his passion. It is no accident that his new section of Mark’s story is bracketed by two healings of blind persons. Jesus gives sight to a blind man at Bethsaida immediately prior to the paragraph in which Jesus asks the disciples who people are saying he is (8:22-26). This section concludes at chapter 10, verse 52, and verses 46-52 recount the giving of sight to Bartimaeus. Sandwiched between the two instances of giving sight to the blind persons is the middle section of Mark which contains the three passion predictions. And in all three cases the disciples didn’t get it. Mark makes this clear by the surrounding actions of the disciples. Following Jesus’ first person prediction, as we have seen, Peter said, “No way!” Again at chapter 9, verse 30f, Jesus tells them of his forthcoming death. Mark writes, But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him. Jesus asks them what they were arguing about on the way. But they were silent – the silence of shame – for Mark writes, “But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.” This called forth from Jesus the words, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” He then proceeded to place a child before them, saying that to welcome a child in Jesus’ name welcomes him. The third passion prediction is found at Mark 10:32-34. Immediately following Jesus’ words, Mark has James and John coming to Jesus asking that he do whatever they say, to which Jesus responds, “What is it you want me to do for you?” © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Their request? “Grant us to sit, one on your right hand and one on your left, in your glory.” Jesus responded, “You do not know what you are asking.” After telling again what was ahead, Mark tells us the other disciples were angry with James and John for seeking the positions of honor. And this elicited from Jesus these words: You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize by their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant… I find Mark’s framing of Jesus’ story fascinating. Could he say any more clearly, “The disciples just didn’t get it!” Hovering over and under these episodes is the implication that the disciples were not at all open to suffering, pain and death. In Jesus they must have sensed they had someone very special and it was their hope that as he ascended in the human drama they would be brushed with his glory. He simply couldn’t get through to them what he had come to realize as the issue of his life and calling. The shadow of the cross was falling on him and they were too dull or intentionally refused to hear him. Their agenda’s goal was glory; Jesus promised suffering and rejection. Portraying the blindness of the disciples, Mark is showing what following Jesus involves, what is the way of discipleship. What the disciples resist Mark makes explicit from the teaching of Jesus. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. (Mark 8:32-34) Tough words, Jesus! No wonder the disciples were intentionally dull; no wonder they didn’t get it. Jesus was possessed by his calling. He wrestled with the temptations to use his charisma, his spiritual power to impress, to gain power, whether with ecclesiastical institutions or political establishment. But, as Luke tells the Temptations story, Jesus prevailed, determined to worship and serve God faithfully, fully. And, realizing the implications of the obedience he sensed as his calling, he knew there would be confrontation, conflict, rejection, suffering and, ultimately, death. No wonder he died alone. And thus my claim made at the beginning of this meditation is not surprising: The way of Jesus is the road not taken. © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 5   As I said when I began, this is a serious charge but, I tell you truthfully, I believe it deeply. I can document in my own Christian experience, how I became gripped by the way of Jesus. Without recounting what for me was a long arduous journey that continues to the present, let me just say that I believe the way of Jesus as that to which he called his disciples and which he embodied was swallowed up in the early centuries of the Christian church. In place of the Jesus of history who faced the established powers of Church and State, that early movement by the fourth century had a high Christology that identified Jesus with God, the consequence of the Council of Nicea called by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 C.E. Constantine’s edict making the Christian religion the religion of the Empire might seem to be a great triumph. I am convinced it was the co-opting of the church. I’m obviously making huge leaps and controversial claims which will be countered by many, by most interpreters of the Christian story I suppose. Nonetheless what was happening in this evolving story was that Jesus was transformed from the historical figure who with non-violent resistance challenged temple and empire to a savior figure who came to die for the sin of the world. It is one thing to seek forgiveness for one’s sin. It is quite another to follow the way of Jesus. Now the church became an institute of salvation, domesticated from a movement of Jesus people committed to challenge the world’s domination systems through non-violent resistance. In recent decades historical Jesus research has put Jesus in his historical context, a time of Imperial domination by Rome and the Temple authorities trying to survive through collaboration. Jesus challenged all of that – non-violently – and for that he was crucified. Again, the way of Jesus has been for the Church the road not taken. Where that road has been taken it has resulted in peril and, most often, death. What I am trying to say is best understood in stories, in this case the stories of some who have sought to follow the way of Jesus. Yesterday was the sixty-sixth anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was in the 1960’s as I was studying in Europe that I came on Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I was overcome with the faith, the courage, the brilliance, the total commitment to what he understood was the way to which he was being called, to resist the Nazi regime and that evil darkness Hitler was bringing to the German nation and to all of Europe. He was at heart a pacifist believing that was the way to fully follow Jesus. Yet as the horror of Nazi atrocities spread, especially the violence being visited on the Jews, even though © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 6   he would at the beginning not know the full extent of the death camps, Bonhoeffer joined in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. He wrestled in his own conscience but finally believed he must act even against his own convictions of non-violence. Just days before the Allied troops liberated the camp at Flossenburg in southern Germany, on the order of Hitler as the war was ending, Bonhoeffer was hung. He met his death calmly, bowing in prayer and meeting his fate at peace. Bonhoeffer has been my companion through many a Lent as I am amazed anew at the heroic obedience of his following the way of Jesus. I recently finished a new biography of Bonhoeffer, once again mesmerized by the life of this modern disciple of Jesus whose last words were, This is the end – for me the beginning of life. During those dark days on the European continent there was playing out another drama which has also been critical in my own understanding of the way of Jesus. It is the story written by a Jewish ethicist and philosopher who had been researching the awful evil of the Nazi terror. He became so depressed by the horror that he searched out the story of a village in the French Alps that became a city of refuge rescuing thousands of refugees from the Nazi terror. Philip Hallie tells the story in a book entitled Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. The center of the story is a French Huguenot pastor, André Trocmé, but it is a story about a whole village, following his example in following the way of Jesus. Trocmé was born into a rather well-to-do family and had a very privileged childhood. Early on his mother was killed in an auto accident, and he lived in a French Huguenot, French Reformed home in which his father’s spirituality was very quiet. But there was so much feeling in André that he could never really let loose until he joined a youth organization in France in his village, in which he was exposed to a very personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and in that experience came himself to a very personal relationship. As a young man, he began to be shaped by the vision of Jesus. One day, during the First World War, his village being occupied by German soldiers, a German soldier said to him, “Would you like some bread? Are you hungry?” He said, “No, I’m not hungry, and if I were, I wouldn’t take bread from you because you are the enemy.” And the soldier said to him, “No, I’m not the enemy. You don’t understand who I am. I’m a Christian.” And André said to him, “My brother is fighting in the war, and you would kill my brother.” He said, “No, I would not kill your brother.” André said, “But, you’re a soldier.” He said, “Yes, but I don’t carry a gun. They allow me, as a telegraph officer, to do my duty without carrying a gun because Jesus has said that I must not kill.” © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 7   The genuineness of this German soldier so impressed André that he took him to his youth organization where the German soldier shared his witness for Jesus. That witness of that German soldier made such a deep impression on him, the German soldier having come to his conviction because of his relationship to Jesus Christ, that André could never get that out of his mind and it started him on the road to pacifism. This encounter so deeply impacted Trocmé that for the rest of his life he lived by the imperative to do no harm to another. Trocmé eventually studied theology at the University of Paris and became a French Reformed pastor. One evening in a men’s group, Trocmé was discussing a book that claimed Jesus was a myth created by St. Paul. Trocmé refuted the book’s claim but found himself asking the question: If Jesus really walked upon this earth, why do we keep treating him as if he were a disembodied, impossibly idealistic ethical theory? If he was a real man, then the Sermon on the Mount was made for people on this earth; and, if he existed, God has shown us in flesh and blood what goodness is for flesh-and-blood people. ( p. 68) The rest of his life was a living out of the Sermon on the Mount. The events of the village of Le Chambon during the German occupation of France during World War II, the story as told by Hallie, is wonderfully moving and inspiring. I suspect what was so powerful for me was the connection between Trocmé’s total living out of the Sermon on the Mount as the catalyst for the magnificent compassion and love that was embodied in the village as it became a city of refuge. To read the life of Bonhoeffer, to read the story of André Trocmé and the village of Le Chambon moves me. Inwardly I know there is something in those stories that reveals life as God intended it to be lived. And I wonder… Will the world ever be changed without the suffering of those who live by the way of Jesus? Is it only through the death of the non-violent resister of evil that the world is changed? Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Bonhoeffer? Is there any hint in the current “Arab Spring” that maybe the lessons of non-violence are being learned even amidst the present chaos? I do not believe we are all called in the same fashion. I do not believe we are all called to seek the place where the battle is raging. Neither do I think the radical obedience of a Bonhoeffer or a Trocmé is something one seeks out. Rather, when faced with such a situation, then one is called to obedience. The issues I raise can be debated endlessly but to no avail. Such a vision of a world where evil is overcome by good, where the nations make war no more and © Grand Valley State University �The Way of Jesus Richard A. Rhem Page 8   the world knows the Shalom of God is a vision that must arise from within one. It cannot be embraced because of the plea of a preacher or call of a statesman. No, I sense it arises from within one as a fruit of the spirit where one has been overwhelmed by the magnificence of Jesus and the road he chose – the road still not taken by most of the church that bears his name, but a road that beckons us again in this Lenten season as we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. Let George Bernard Shaw have the last word: “The only trouble with Christianity is that it has never been tried.” References: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers From Prison. First published 1953; Touchstone reprint edition, 1997. Philip Hallie. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. Harper Perennial; Reprint edition, 1994. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lent Scripture Text Mark 8:31-9:1 Location The location of the interview St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven References Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers From Prison. Touchstone edition, 1997, Philip Hallie. Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There. Harper Perennial, Reprint edition, 1994. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20110410 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-04-10 Title A name given to the resource The Way of Jesus: The Road Not Taken Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on April 10, 2011 entitled "The Way of Jesus: The Road Not Taken", on the occasion of Lent, at St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven. Scripture references: Mark 8:31-9:1. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Nonviolence Way of Jesus https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/44f20a6203da0f1e58ebe5bb07d81352.pdf 0f12c33a8eaf01d8ca13459fdf17b5d8 PDF Text Text The Lure of Love: The Christmas Revelation I John 4: 7-9, 12, 16, 19; Luke 2: 1-14 Richard A. Rhem St. John’s Episcopal Church Grand Haven, Michigan Advent, December 19, 2010 I hardly know how to begin. I’ve pondered long over how to engage you with what I want to say. I think my struggle derives from the fact that what I want to say seems so obvious, so expected, so ordinary at Christmas – that God is love, that love came down at Christmas, that heaven touched earth with love at Christmas, that the Christmas story is love talk. What a story it is! A heavily pregnant teenager, unmarried, who had been visited by an angel, on an arduous journey with the faithful man to whom she was engaged. The story is so familiar – the crowded inn in which there was no room, the onset of labor pain, the cattle shed, the birth, the baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in the manger – the star, the angel chorus, the shepherds, the adoration. A beautiful story; a lovely story that never fails to touch us deeply. And as many years as we have celebrated it in pageant and song and worship, it never loses its power to move us. For a brief season the world becomes a softer place. God is love. The writer of the letter of First John said it just that way. In John’s Gospel the familiar John 3: 16 tells us God so loved the world…, but I John 4:8 states it straight out – God is love. I wonder if that isn’t so familiar that we don’t hear it. Or, perhaps, we think of God loving us, the world, whatever, but how often do we really take in the straightforward statement that God is love. And, I suspect, even more rarely do we contemplate what that means for the world, for creation and history, its process and destiny. Let me state my theme clearly: The Christmas revelation is precisely that God is love. And that I would claim is a radical affirmation. If God is love then the source, ground and goal of reality, of all being, is love and it is the lure of love that moves creation from planets and stars to people and particles in the cosmic dance. Love is the originating fount, the dynamic of the emerging process and the final destiny of being. It would have been quite another revelation if God’s presence had been marked by blinding power, scattering Rome’s legions and establishing a Divine Potentate © Grand Valley State University   �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 2   to rule with a rod of iron. As a matter of fact John the Baptist hoped for such a display of God’s power – the power of the righteous Ruler of the universe. In the Gospels as well there are apocalyptic moments which claim to be from Jesus but which scholars now question, seeing them as reflecting the continuing apocalyptic movement in the early Jesus movement. So we must recognize that the New Testament itself is not consistent. Still we have that central core – The Word became flesh and the flesh was the flesh of a child born in deep humility and obscurity, in poverty and peril. Is that the sign of the presence of God? Is this one Immanuel – God with us? Then what is revealed of God? God is love in all the vulnerability and precariousness of love. Is that the way you think of God? Is that the God you worship, to whom you pray? I raise those questions because I have become quite overwhelmed with the disconnect between the Christmas revelation of God whose only mode of operation is the lure of love and our more traditional description of God using the Latin Prefix omni meaning “all”– omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent – oh, that is one of our favorites isn’t it? Almighty God! Don’t we really want the God on our side to be almighty! In his Gifford Lectures of 1927-28, Alfred North Whitehead, one of the profound thinkers of the 20th century pointed out how the Christian movement, adopted by the Roman Empire, lost “the brief Galilean vision of humility” and, he claims, “the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.” (Process and Reality, p. 519). I can’t imagine a more concise statement of how the revelation of God in the birth of a child was turned into its opposite – a God of imperial power ruling with might. And yet we can never feel comfortable with the God of power and might; we have a deep intuition that the Christmas revelation is true and, annually as we make our journey to Bethlehem, we know it is so. We are moved anew; we are touched in the depths of our being. Love is the creative center of Being, of reality, and love is the most potent force in the world – the lure of love beckons us to love and offer our lives to build a world where love prevails. As we survey the human historical record, the brief Galilean vision of the Christmas child become an agent of grace, of healing and compassion, flickers pathetically in light of the brutal power moves of the caesars of this world. And yet that light has never been extinguished and over the long haul the world is moving toward more peaceful existence. If we look simply at the present, there is reason enough to despair and it seems positive movement is so painfully slow. It is tempting to yield to depression and grow bitter with cynicism. But, if we take © Grand Valley State University �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 3   the long-range view over aeons of time, surely there is a movement toward the light, toward a more humane world, a world at peace. Oh, perhaps you are thinking, “He has had too much Christmas eggnog.” Perhaps you think I’ve ceased reading the news or watching the evening news. Not so; I am sorely tempted to despair when I see the continuing tragic chess game of the world powers, jockeying for dominance, jockeying for natural resources, jockeying for theaters of control. I’m quite aware that we are at war in situations where our military leadership itself tells us the solution cannot be found militarily. I know we are as a nation in the grip of a military-industrial dominance that is secured in place by special interest; that we are becoming a plutocracy – with government by wealth for wealth; that we are polluting our earth and fouling the air – in a word, I am not unaware of the peril in which we find ourselves presently and I am not naïve to think suddenly one will arise with a magic wand. But this too I know: two thousand years ago much of what we speak of as “the West” was ruled by imperial power and actually a rather advanced governing power – the Roman Empire. We can’t be certain of the details of the Christmas story – perhaps the edict of Caesar Augustus, the journey to Bethlehem were just that – story, to convey the connection of an ancient promise about the birth of one from the tree of Jesse, to be born in Bethlehem, with the birth of Jesus. Nonetheless, a child was born in poverty and obscurity and that child has changed the face of the earth and transformed the human story. The mighty Empire whose edicts moved the masses under its domination eventually crucified that child that was born in Bethlehem. He had grown to maturity at a restless time in that ancient world. Apocalypticism – hopes and fears of the end of the world – was widespread. He came under the influence of a preacher named John who baptized him and he too sensed a call to call his people to repentance and faith in the God of that covenant faith. And then something happened. He sensed God calling him to bring another message – a message of grace and healing. He moved north to Galilee and created in Whitehead’s words that “brief Galilean vision”, a vision of grace and healing and compassion. Returning to Jerusalem for the observance of Passover his popularity preceded him. Empire and Temple conspired together; he was crucified and there was darkness at noon. Ironically we call that Friday “Good”; the darkest day on the human calendar we call “Good”. Perhaps because that darkness was soon dispersed by the light of Easter – the most joyful, triumphal celebration on the Christian calendar follows hard on the heels of the darkest moment on our Christian world calendar. That’s why the Fourth Gospel relates the coming of that one into the world as the dawning of Light – light the world has never nor will ever extinguish. The eternal Word or Intention of God became enfleshed in our world history and there was grace and truth. Oh, a light too bright, a truth too telling and so the powers that © Grand Valley State University �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 4   be thought to extinguish the Light by crucifying the one who embodied grace and truth that exposed their schemes of domination and brutal control. But it didn’t work, you see, for we continue to tell the story. Once every year we return to Bethlehem and the world becomes a softer place. Once every year we go to Calvary and feel the darkness and then wait for the dawning of Easter light. You see that Light will never be extinguished; that movement from the death of crucifixion to the triumph of resurrection is the last word. And do you know why that is the case? Is it not what we are celebrating yet again? Is it not because of what we have learned at the Manger – that the presence of God in our history is, as it were, the presence of a child – vulnerable, precarious, defenseless – telling us in the revelation of Christmas that God is love. God is love. Do you sense the radical claim we make thus? How can we get beyond all the sentimental accretions to the word Love? As I began I said, “If God is love then the source, ground and goal of reality, of all being, is love and it is the lure of love that moves creation from planets and stars to people and particles.” What does that mean? Let me suggest a possibility. Might it not mean that the creative source and center of being, of the whole of reality is love and that love keeps on giving, sustaining in existence the whole cosmic drama and will do so until love has overcome all resistance and the Kingdom of God,of love, prevails. When will that be? We don’t know for there is no predestined plan – contrary to my Calvinist forbears. Love does not control; it simply gives and gives again on behalf of the other while it is in the hands of the other to receive and secure the triumph of love or reject and seal love’s tragedy. W. H. Vanstone, an Anglican priest, writes profoundly on this matter in his work, Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense (1977): The power which love gives to the other is power to determine the issue of love – its completion or frustration, its triumph or tragedy. This is the vulnerability of authentic love – that it surrenders to the other power over its own issue, power to determine the triumph or the tragedy of love. The vulnerability of God means that the issue of His love as triumph or tragedy depends upon His creation. There is given to the creation the power to determine the love of God as either triumphant or tragic love. This power may be called ‘power of response’: upon the response of the creation the love of God depends for its triumph or its tragedy. ( p. 67) But, in the straightforward words of St. Paul, “Love never ends.” In face of every tragic rejection, love seeks out another way to overcome resistance and alienation. Love never ends. © Grand Valley State University �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Do you suspect I am sniffing some happy drug? No, I’m serious. Love will prevail. Think about it; two thousand years ago would anyone have believed a child born in obscurity and poverty would transform the world? One of the great accomplishments by which the Roman Empire kept the empire in hand was the Roman road system. But by land or sea, how long did it take to move from Rome to Jerusalem? And yet the Christmas child of Bethlehem rocked that empire and has forever changed life on earth. What might Jesus have accomplished with a smart phone or a Blackberry! I’m not sure what you think of Julian Assange – well, I bet I do know! Nonetheless, whether he is a serious idealist or a dangerous anarchist, he has the empires of the world as worried as was Rome about Jesus. We are told we need the cover of secrecy to make the world work – no transparency allowed because we really don’t want our scheming and conniving and manipulating exposed to the light of day. The world doesn’t work that way! But it will one day. Because from the creative core of reality love will find a way and it will never quit until there is peace on earth, human wellbeing, global community – until the nations beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; until nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall they learn war any more. Love will not quit until the wolf and the lamb feed together and they shall not hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain. Why am I so certain? Is it not because every year as we journey again to Bethlehem we really know it is true? Do we not know deep down that it is true? Love is the ultimate truth, the one cosmic absolute – our hearts tell us so. We have the concrete instance of Jesus. Who would have believed it? Who would have wagered that that one solitary life would have greater impact than all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the kings that ever ruled or parliaments that ever sat? It happened because the love of God found a willing envoy. Jeremy Rifkin has written a thick volume entitled The Empathic Civilization in which he traces the course of human development to the present in which he challenges the long-held assumption that human beings are by nature aggressive, materialistic, utilitarian, and self-interested. He opens this large study with the scene on Flander’s Field on Christmas Eve, 1914. Hellish conditions prevailed. German and English troops were dug in in trenches only 30-50 yards from each other. © Grand Valley State University �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 6   The trenches were waterlogged. Soldiers shared their quarters with rats and vermin. Lacking adequate latrines, the stench of human excrement was everywhere. The men slept upright to avoid the mud and sludge of their makeshift arrangements. Dead soldiers littered the no-man’s-land between opposing forces, the bodies left to rot and decompose within yards of their still-living comrades who were unable to collect them for burial. As dusk fell over the battlefields, something extraordinary happened. The Germans began lighting candles on the thousands of small Christmas trees that had been sent to the front to lend some comfort to the men. The German soldiers then began to sing Christmas carols – first “Silent Night,” then a stream of other songs followed. The English soldiers were stunned. One soldier, gazing in disbelief at the enemy lines, said the blazed trenches looked “like the footlights of a theater.” The English solders responded with applause, at first tentatively, then with exuberance. They began to sing Christmas carols back to their German foes to equally robust applause. A few men from both sides crawled out of their trenches and began to walk across the no-man’s-land toward each other. Soon hundreds followed. As word spread across the front, thousands of men poured out of their trenches. They shook hands, exchanged cigarettes and cakes and showed photos of their families. They talked about where they hailed from reminisced about Christmases past, and joked about the absurdity of war. The next morning, as the Christmas sun rose over the battlefield of Europe, tens of thousands of men – some estimates put the number as high as 100,000 soldiers – talked quietly with one another. Enemies just twenty-four hours earlier, they found themselves helping each other bury their dead comrades. More than a few pickup soccer matches were reported. Even officers at the front participated, although when the news filtered back to the high command in the rear, the generals took a less enthusiastic view of the affair. Worried that the truce might undermine military morale, the generals quickly took measures to rein in their troops. (pp. 5-6) Fascinating true story. That’s what Christmas does to us because it is true and deep down in our being we know it is true. Fortunately for the old world order of empires there were level-headed generals there who put an end to it before the Christmas truce might undermine military morale. Thus the war went on until November 1918, accounting for 8.5 million military deaths. But it was a sign. © Grand Valley State University �The Lure of Love Richard A. Rhem Page 7   God is love – that is the Christmas revelation and the day is coming when that love signed in the child will prevail – Next year? Next century? Next millennium? No one knows but surely it will come for at the creative core of Being we are being lured by love and love will prevail; God will prevail and All will be well, All will be well, All manner of things will be well. Reference: Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousnes in a World in Crisis. New York: The Penguin Group, 2009. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Advent Evensong Scripture Text I John 4:7-9, 12, 16, 19, Luke 2:1-14 Location The location of the interview St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven References Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization, 2009. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20101219 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-12-19 Title A name given to the resource The Lure of Love: The Christmas Revelation Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on December 19, 2010 entitled "The Lure of Love: The Christmas Revelation", on the occasion of Advent Evensong, at St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven. Scripture references: I John 4:7-9, 12, 16, 19, Luke 2:1-14. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives A Humane World God Revealed as Love https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/012ab717644317b73afe8431452ca678.pdf 1c9304dec1059713f2d5c61812837071 PDF Text Text John and Jesus: A Graceful Parting Evensong Service at Advent Psalm 114-115; Isaiah 5: 1-7; II Peter 3: 11-18; Luke 7: 28-35 Richard A. Rhem St. John’s Episcopal Church Grand Haven, Michigan December 5, 2010 Prepared text of the sermon I have a double reason for being grateful to St. John’s parish and the Rector, Father Jared, for this invitation to bring the meditation this evening. The first reason being that this is a breakthrough for me. It was the Spring of 2004. My retirement from Christ Community was imminent. Our financial counselor from New Jersey made a call. We were looking at how things financial would work out. I could see anxiety on Nancy’s face, obviously wondering if we could survive. At one point I said to her, “Don’t worry, honey. I will be invited to preach often in area churches and that will supplement our retirement funds.” When I related that incident to my people at Christ Community, they laughed out loud. They knew, as did I, that no one would touch me with a ten-foot pole and that has proved to be true. Being new in town and being young and courageous, Father Jared has given me the first such invitation in six and a half years. So you see, this is a breakthrough for me and I’m grateful to him for taking the risk. But, more seriously, there is a second reason I’m grateful for this opportunity; it has forced me to take up again the theme of the Advent Season and experience in depth the beginning of the new church year. I was raised and educated in the Reformed tradition which, for all its positive dimensions, never succeeded in holding on to or recapturing the rich tradition of Catholic, sacramental worship. In fact it was a badge of honor that such rich, liturgical worship with all the symbolism and, of course, the observance of the church year was left behind in favor of “the pure preaching of the Word” as guided by the catechism. Over the years, the observance of the seasons of the church year became more and more meaningful to me personally and, I believe, to the people I served as well. The Christian calendar was the framework within which our existence found meaning, being filled with meaning far beyond the simple marking of the calendar per se. And Advent is the beginning, a new year in which once again we will journey together as a people through the events that mark the story of Jesus, the story of Immanuel – God with us. © Grand Valley State University   �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 2   That is where we find ourselves this evening; it is Advent once again. The word itself means “coming.” Thus the theme – the One who came will come again. I went back over the themes of my Advent preaching over the years. That confirmed that of which I was aware; I had over the years developed a problem with that proclamation. Earlier in my ministry I had lived by the traditional orthodox Christian story – God was history’s sovereign. God created, God’s providence guided the unfolding creation and God would bring all things to their consummation. Jesus the Savior was born, crucified, raised from the dead, ascended to the throne of God from whence He would come in judgment and grace to judge and to redeem after which He would hand over the Kingdom to the Father and God would be all in all. In various ways and for various reasons that straightforward scheme of things began to unravel for me. I smile as I look over those old Advent sermon themes. For example, Advent, 1984: the confident proclamation – “The King Is Coming”; but a few years later – Advent, 1992, my sermon title for the first Sunday in Advent was “Do You Really Think He Is Going to Come?” My texts were from Acts 3 and Revelation 22. The Acts 3 passage may be the most primitive Christology in the New Testament. Peter addresses the crowd after enabling a lame man to walk and concludes with a call to repentance and faith in Jesus as the Messiah: Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, so the times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus, who must remain in heaven until the time of universal restoration that God announced long ago through his holy prophets. (Acts 3: 19-21) Here you have one ancient witness who paints a picture of Jesus, who is presented in the opening of Acts as ascending to the Father, now on the verge of returning to effect a universal restoration – the fulfilled Kingdom of God. One can hardly miss the urgency as well as the sense that this would be a literal return to the earthly scene and a literal effecting of the reign of God. The text from Revelation 22 is entitled in my NRSV “Epilogue and Benediction” and the visionary, John, records the voice that addresses him at the close of the vision. The voice is the ascended Jesus who declares: “See, I am coming soon… (Revelation 22:12). I do believe that was the confident hope of many followers of Jesus who were called Followers of The Way. There has been a serious scholarly discussion on the question of whether or not Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah as well as a sharp disagreement among New Testament scholars as to whether or not Jesus © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 3   was part of the widespread apocalyptic mood that prevailed in his day. The debate continues and, as is the case with most such questions of the historical Jesus research, probably cannot be definitively answered. But no matter, for it seems clear to me, whether Jesus bought into the apocalyptic mind-set and expectation, his early followers did. And further, for all the symbolism in which that expectation of the end was clothed, I do think there was an expectation of a literal return of the reigning Christ at God’s right hand and an end of history as we know it. That has always been the case with a part of the Christian Church and continues such to our time. It was that literal interpretation of a “second coming” that I was beginning to question. Thus it was that finally I felt I must be honest with my people and acknowledge that such a scenario was no longer compelling for me. I broke the news very carefully. I simply said, “Jesus isn’t coming again.” Well you have to be pretty confident of your people to be that straightforward but that was the way we were. I do remember coming home for Sunday dinner only to be met by Nancy who said to me, “You don’t know everything!” But she did give me dinner. And our financial advisor to whom I referred earlier was listening to a tape of the sermon and reported that he was so shocked he almost ran off the New Jersey Turnpike! Obviously I did not make that announcement and leave it. I went on to relate how, just as we had come to see the early chapters of Genesis as mythical stories of the beginning, just so I was coming to understand the highly symbolic stories and images of the End, not as literal portrayals of what is yet to be but, rather, mythical stories that affirmed that the End would be the triumph of Grace – that the God of the Beginning would be the God of the End – the God who in the present was present with us. This is how I ended that sermon: In the Beginning – God In the End – God In the meantime – God, the God whose heart is laid bare in the life of Jesus. Where is history going? I don’t know. What will happen to planet Earth? I don’t know. I only trust my life and yours, those I’ve loved and lost awhile, my children and my children’s children, are grasped in the grasp of Love that will never fail – here, now and beyond. – That is enough. © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 4   The theme of hope found expression in a number of Advent sermons in subsequent years. In 1995 the series of sermons for Advent was entitled “Now – But Then.” For Advent III the sermon subject was “Can We Be Truthful and Hopeful?” The sermon ended thus: …To know Emmanuel is to know that God is with us, God is with us here and now; God is with us in the darkness; God is with us in our health and God is with us in our dying. God is with us in our loving and caring. God, here and now! That’s the content of Christian hope…God is in this process of which we are a part, embraces it all and goes through it all with us and gives us that amazing capacity in the darkness to live as though the Light is about to dawn. Hope, hope doesn’t come from experience. Experience shatters hope! Hope comes from God, and it is hope in God and it is the experience of the presence of God, here in the darkness where we dwell in the land of the shadow of death. Advent calls us to think about the end, but not the year 2000 or 3000 or 10,000. It calls us to speak about the end of life, the purpose of life, the meaning of life, which is God with us. God with us. Why do we keep on hoping? That, to me, is an amazing thing. After all these years, we keep on hoping. After all of the wars, after all of the death and disease, after all of the brokenness, we keep on hoping. To me, it is the best sign I know that the hope stems from God, Who says to us there is no darkness so dark, there is no coldness so cold, there is no storm so severe, but what I will be with you, I will keep you, I will never let you go. That is Advent hope. It is the present appropriation of a future consummation. Hope teamed with faith keep us moving toward love, which is at the heart of all things. I believe that, and in that, I hope. And in that hope, the darkness is scattered and the light dawns, because God is with us in the meantime. If we don’t feel for something more, we’ll fall for something less. If we don’t reach for something above us, we’ll fall for something below us. It is in the gift of hope that the present is transformed. And I can say in regard to now and then, all is well. All is well. It is because each recurring Advent brings with it that strong affirmation of hope that it is so invigorating to enter once again into this season and know one is beginning anew the passage through the story of Jesus. In the 1995 sermon referred to above I began with a statement from the Church of England entitled “Christian Believing:” Christian life is an adventure, a voyage of discovery, a journey, sustained by faith and hope toward a final and complete communion with love at the heart of things. That became for me the perspective with which I enter each new Advent Season. © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 5   But the New Testament readings for this evening add another central Advent theme – the call to prepare for the coming of the Lord. Again, traditionally, this had to do with the conviction that history was nearing its end and the Judge of all the earth would soon appear. This evening’s Epistle lesson from the second letter of Peter follows up on the reading for Advent I – II Peter 3: 1-10. I smile as I read that passage because obviously there were those already when this Epistle was written who doubted that Jesus would return. This, in fact, is the central thrust of II Peter – deny the imminent coming of the Lord to your peril and, further, because He will come in God’s good time, one must be ready – Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God… This call to moral seriousness calls to mind the ministry of John the Baptist who is the subject of the Gospel reading from Luke 7. The birth of John and the prophecies spoken over him are recorded in Luke’s Gospel in connection with the birth of Jesus. Mark’s Gospel introduces John the Baptist with a quote from, he says, Isaiah: See I am sending my messenger ahead of you, Who will prepare your way; The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. The “messenger” reference is from Malachi, not Isaiah, and the reference there is to the re-appearance of the fiery prophet Elijah. The first three Gospels have shaped the most familiar rendering of the story line – John the Baptist carries on a movement of religious reform in the nature of apocalypticism that was in the air at that time. The End was approaching, God’s judgment was near, John’s call was to repentance with the washing of baptism as the ritual sign. Then Jesus appears and is baptized by John and receives his call to ministry as the heavens open and the Spirit as a dove falls upon him. From thence the Gospels relate the ministry of Jesus, noting John had been thrown in prison for daring to tell King Herod he could not have Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, as his own. John’s integrity got him imprisoned and ultimately beheaded. If we go to the Gospel of John we learn an interesting piece of data not reported in the first three Gospels. The fourth Gospel is not generally thought of as giving an historically accurate account of Jesus’ ministry but a good case can be made for John’s note that Jesus began a ministry in Judea. In John 4: 1-3 we read, Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John, – although it was not Jesus © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 6   himself but his disciples who baptized – he left Judea and started back to Galilee. There is no mention of this in the other Gospels; Matthew and Mark simply say when John was put in prison Jesus left to begin his ministry in Galilee. Luke doesn’t mention John’s imprisonment but, following the narrative of the Temptation in the Wilderness, Luke has Jesus appearing at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth where he was invited to read the Scripture – a passage from Isaiah – When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ Why do I make note of this? Note how the Isaiah passage is full of good news; it is Gospel! And Jesus, in Luke’s rendering, announces Isaiah’s vision of a day of grace as being fulfilled in his own ministry. And there is a fascinating omission from the Isaiah reading. If one goes to Isaiah 61:1-2 one finds in Luke that either Luke or, if he accurately portrays the scene, Jesus, omits the last line of the citation. In Luke Jesus concludes the reading “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” If you turn to the Isaiah passage, those words are followed by “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Could that be just an oversight? Maybe, but I suspect that by Jesus or by Luke it is an intentional omission. Why do I claim that? Because I see Luke portraying Jesus as inaugurating a ministry of grace – not a day of vengeance, of fiery judgment as had marked the ministry of John the Baptist. Jesus’ move from Judea to Galilee was not simply a change in geography; it was a change in his whole ministry – its tone, its thrust, its whole proclamation. Jesus had been baptized by John the Baptist. He obviously began his ministry under John’s influence and in the manner of John whose model was the prophet Elijah of Malachi 3: © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 7   See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to the temple… But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? (Malachi 3: 1-2) The coming one would bring judgment – a refiner and purifier. Such a ministry found fulfillment in the ministry of John the Baptist and that is where Jesus began. I mentioned above that only John’s Gospel tells of the early Judean ministry of Jesus. John’s Gospel also places Jesus’ cleansing of the temple during that early period rather than during Holy Week as do the other three Gospels. If John’s Gospel is correct in the early placement of that incident it would fit well with the nature of Jesus’ early ministry under the influence of John the Baptist. Then to juxtapose such a scene with his declaration in Nazareth – to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord, omitting the day of vengeance of our God, we can see an entirely new spirit and ministry in Jesus. Meanwhile John the Baptist is in prison. He had the highest hopes for Jesus’ ministry. He saw Jesus as the return of Elijah, the precursor of the End. John so longed for the intervention of God, the day of judgment on the wicked and the salvation of God’s people. John could bear his imprisonment because in Jesus he could feel the approach of the End and the consummation of all the promises of God. But then his followers visiting him in prison brought back stories of Jesus’ Galilean ministry – a ministry of grace not judgment, of healing, of joy, of open table fellowship. And John wondered. He said, “That’s not in the program. That’s not exactly the agenda I had set for Jesus. I thought by now the heavens would have opened and the wrath of God poured out, and all I hear about are blind people seeing and deaf people hearing and people dancing, singing, celebrating the grace of God!” And finally, he couldn’t stand it any more and he sent the followers with this question full of anguish: “Are you the one, or do I have to look for another?” And the translation of that question could be as well, “Or must I look for another kind of Messiah?” In other words, the question that John put to Jesus was, “Did I miss it? Did I get it wrong?” John’s question to Jesus through John’s disciples is what is behind this evening’s Gospel reading. John’s question made Jesus address the dramatic change in his ministry in Galilee as opposed to his early ministry in Judea under John’s influence. Can you imagine the anguish? John was a good man. John was serious. John was passionate. John’s whole life and ministry was at stake, in the answer to that © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 8   question. John came to the end of his days entertaining the possibility that he might have gotten it wrong. Jesus is never defensive. Did you ever notice that in the Gospels? Jesus is never defensive. He didn’t answer directly, only indirectly. He said to the followers of John, “Look around. See what’s happening? See the good things that are happening? Go tell John what you’re experiencing here.” But, of course, behind that indirect answer was the obvious direct answer. “John, I’m not the one you hoped I would be. John, I can’t paint from Malachi’s palette, for in my own struggle to find my own vision and to gain my own voice, I hears another song. I heard the song of the suffering servant. I heard Isaiah’s record of that one who spoke of one who would not crush the broken reed or snuff out the smoldering wick. John, I can’t do it your way. I have to do it according to the vision that compels me. I’ve got to proclaim a grace that is grander than anything you ever dreamed of. I understand, John, you’ve run out of patience, but the God who has gripped me never runs out of patience. I understand, John, your dis-ease with all that you see about us, but I drink at the fountain of a God who will never abandon us, who’ll stay by creation and walk with us and never let us go.” Jesus affirmed John. He didn’t make a big point of saying John was wrong. In fact, it would seem that Jesus was ready to acknowledge that John had fulfilled the role that he had to fulfill. John was a prophet, the greatest of the prophets, but something new had dawned and Jesus was called to inaugurate a new vision of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is clear: I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than he. (Luke 7: 28) I call that a gracious parting. Would that, in the history of the Church, there had been more gracious partings and less brokenness, bitterness and even too often war. John and Jesus – a gracious movement away by Jesus because John’s hope for the end with the fire of judgment on the earth, destroying those beyond the covenant fold was for Jesus a hope too narrow; his vision would not be realized until the arms of God’s love were wrapped around the whole human family. For Jesus there was being inaugurated a Kingdom of Grace to which all God’s children were invited. Advent 2010 and we find ourselves in an emerging cosmic reality neither John nor Jesus could have dreamed of. And, for many of us, this Advent we are not looking for the end of human history at some future date, be it a decade, a century or a millennium. Rather than God “up there,” “out there,” we may sense God as the creative Love at the center of things beckoning us as the cosmos evolves to give human shape to that love, thus living in the communion of Love, trusting, as was true for Jesus, there is a bigger picture than we’ve yet dreamed of, a Grace we can hardly conceive of. In a word, a future beyond our wildest dreams. © Grand Valley State University �John and Jesus: A Gracious Parting Richard A. Rhem Page 9   That being the case, John the Baptist, echoed by the writer of the second Epistle of Peter, might ask – What sort of persons ought we to be? Advent, full of hope, is a time of reflection on our lives to be sure we are walking in love, full of grace and compassion, being and doing what we can to live, already, love’s fullest expression. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Advent Evensong Scripture Text Psalm 114-115, Isaiah 5: 1-7, II Peter 3: 11-18, Luke 7: 28-35 Location The location of the interview St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20101205 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-12-05 Title A name given to the resource John and Jesus, A Graceful Parting Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on December 5, 2010 entitled "John and Jesus, A Graceful Parting", on the occasion of Advent Evensong, at St. John's Episcopal Church, Grand Haven. Scripture references: Psalm 114-115, Isaiah 5: 1-7, II Peter 3: 11-18, Luke 7: 28-35. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Jesus' Ministry Nonjudgmental Grace https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/dd65ac2e48e044d45612c9a357f26cf9.pdf 637046f9eef2bdac084bde8fe4c27219 PDF Text Text The Celebration of Life and Death in Community All Saints’ Day Service Ecclesiastes 3: 1-13; Romans 14: 1-9; John 14: 1-3 Richard A. Rhem Above and Beyond Banquet Hall Norton Shores, Michigan October 31, 2010 Prepared text of sermon Bonds of friendship and shared memories of rich experiences of gathering in inspiring worship services continue to beckon us to evenings like this, gatherings, as I playfully suggested this past Spring, might be called “The Church of the Holy Seasons” or “The Community of the Holy Seasons.” Here we are again celebrating a Holy Day in the church’s liturgical calendar – All Saints Day. As I have indicated in a previous All Saints celebration, in my first incarnation as a Dutch Reformed Domine, I would be speaking about the Reformation of the 16th century when the Protestant movement was born, breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church. But I have undergone a major shift in my understanding and you with me – a shift not from the great central Reformation theme of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, but a shift in how the gracious God is celebrated in the Church’s worship. This is “old hat” for you now. Nonetheless I keep gaining a deeper perspective on the change we experienced from the intellectual nature of classic Reformed worship to the sensual aesthetic liturgical drama of Catholic worship which, in large measure, we adopted. As I was musing over this evening’s meditation, for some reason I recalled the book by Hans Küng, Does God Exist? It was published in 1978. Prior to that Küng had published On Being a Christian (1976). It was a blockbuster on the continent – a most unusual occurrence since books of theology were not in great demand in Europe at the time. But Küng touched a nerve in post-Christian Europe. He prefaced his work thus: “This book is written for all those who, for any reason at all, honestly and sincerely want to know what Christianity, what being a Christian, really means. It is written also for those who do not believe, but nevertheless seriously inquire; who did believe, but are not satisfied with their unbelief; who do believe, but feel insecure in their faith; who are at a loss, between belief and unbelief; who are skeptical, both about their convictions and © Grand Valley State University   �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 2   about their doubts. It is written then for Christians and atheists, Gnostics and agnostics, pietists and positivists, lukewarm and zealous Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox. Even outside the churches, are there not many people who are not content to spend a whole lifetime approaching the fundamental questions of human existence with mere feelings, personal prejudices and apparently plausible explanations? And are there not today also in all churches, many people who do not want to remain at the childhood stage in their faith, who expect more than a new exposition of the words of the Bible or a new denominational catechism, who can no longer find any final anchorage in infallible formulas of Scripture (Protestants), of Tradition (Orthodox), of the Magisterium (Catholics)? These are all people who will not accept Christianity at a reduced price, who will not adopt outward conformism and a pretense of adoption in place of ecclesiastical traditionalism, but who are seeking a way to the uncurtailed truth of Christianity and Christian existence, unimpressed by ecclesiastical doctrinal constraints on the right or ideological whims on the left. This is not to say that what is offered here is merely a new adaptation of a traditional profession of faith or even a miniature dogmatic theology with the answer to all old or new disputed questions; and it certainly is not an attempt to propagate a new Christianity…. The present work is simply an attempt by someone convinced of the cause of Christianity, without proselytizing zeal or theological lyricism, without stale scholasticism or modern theological Chinese, to produce a relevant and opportune introduction to being a Christian… It is an attempt in the midst of an epoch-making upheaval of the Church’s doctrine, morality and discipline, to discover what is permanent: what is different from other world religions and modern humanisms; and at the same time what is common to the separated Christian churches. The reader will rightly expect us to work out for him in his practice of Christianity, in a way that is both historically exact and yet up to date, in the light of the most recent scholarship and yet intelligibly, what is decisive and distinctive about the Christian program: what this program originally meant, before it was covered with the dust and debris of two thousand years, and what this program, brought to light again, can offer today by way of a meaningful, fulfilled life to each and every one. This is not another gospel, but the same ancient gospel rediscovered for today…” © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 3   Reading that preface again, I’m not surprised that it became a best seller. I used the book for a year-long study class. For me it was a marvelous review of my four years of study at Leiden with Professor Berkhof. Amazing scholar that he is, Hans Küng came out two years later with another work, this one not 600 pages as On Being a Christian but rather 700 pages, titled Does God Exist? This text I also used for a year-long study class and it is this work that came to my mind as I was thinking about my meditation for this evening. You will be relieved to know that I’m not going to give you a review of Does God Exist? But it came to mind because of two other books I’ve been dealing with over the summer. If you have attended the Ganges gatherings you are aware that I have spoken about Karen Armstrong’s latest work, The Case for God, and Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God. They work well together and complement each other, Karen Armstrong’s book dealing with the God question more academically covering the history of theology, while Barbara Hagerty records her own personal quest giving a review of the latest brain research into spiritual experience and abundant recording of the spiritual experiences of persons who have had mystical experiences or near-death experiences, persons, that is, whose lives have been touched by another dimension beyond our ordinary space-time world. Hagerty’s accounts confirm the major thesis of Karen Armstrong that God cannot be found at the end of a syllogism or complex rational deliberation but only in the practice of the presence of God, that is in the actual engagement in spiritual exercise, in community worship, in liturgy, ritual and sacrament, in personal devotion and meditation. Karen Armstrong contends this was always understood until the modern period beginning in the 17th century with the rise of the natural sciences and the scientific method of empirical research. Previously, human reason had coexisted with mythical thinking – in Greek, logos and mythos – and together enabled humankind to negotiate the human journey. Both had their place; both had their function. She explains, Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or “myth.” Myths…were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. (p. xi) I review this because with Armstrong and Hagerty so much on my mind, the work of Hans Küng flashed in my mind for it is in his Does God Exist? that I was prepared to embrace and affirm the two recent works. As stated above, Armstrong points to the modern period as the time of putting the existence of God in question. Küng documents that claim opening with a section entitled “Reason or Faith” in which he weaves the development of modern atheism. A © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 4   section, “The New Understanding of God,” is followed by a section entitled “The Challenge of Atheism.” It is this section that came to mind in my musings. The subdivisions paint a clear path: I. II. III. God – a projection of man? Ludwig Feuerbach God – a consolation serving vested interests? Karl Marx God – an infantile illusion? Sigmund Freud The next division is entitled “Nihilism – Consequence of Atheism.” And there you have it! Küng's road map to Nihilism was burned into my brain and the structure of Küng’s work jumped out at me. In discussing it with a colleague, the image of a capital V came into my mind. Beginning at the top of the left leg, I put Feuerbach because, while he did not initiate the modern discussion of God, he was a major contributor with his idea of God as a human projection – “Consciousness of God is self-consciousness; knowledge of God is selfknowledge.” (L. Feuerbach, Wesen des Christentums, p. 51, English translation, p. 12). There exists no objective counterpart to our thoughts of God; theology has become anthropology. That fundamental move was assumed to be true by those who followed him – Marx and Freud – and the end of that left leg of the V, ending at the vortex is Nietzsche and Nihilism. Nihilism, the term comes from the Latin nihil, nothing. Without dealing with this at any depth, I only point to the general idea associated with nihilism, namely, that life is without objective meaning, purpose or intrinsic value. Nihilism takes various forms – moral nihilism – morality does not exist as something inherent to objective reality; existential nihilism – life has no intrinsic meaning or value, is without purpose or significance. No more need be said as already it is obvious that such pessimism, affirming only emptiness, meaninglessness, and nothingness is the conclusion of the movement of modern atheism. Nietzsche was a towering figure – brilliant and sensitive. He was not pleased where the project of atheism took him. His famous cry, “God is dead” and “we killed him” was not a triumphant acclamation but a despairing realization that now “everything is permissible” because the whole foundation of Western culture had been undermined. Having reached the bottom of the downward movement of modern atheism in Nietzsche’s nihilism, Hans Küng seeks for a way to move up the right leg of the V. How can one move beyond the abyss of atheism’s end in nihilism toward purpose, meaning, value grounded in reality? Küng begins building in a major division, “Yes to Reality – Alternative to Nihilism.” He contends there are fundamental alternatives: © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 5   We can say yes or no to uncertain reality. Such a fundamental decision and fundamental approach always involves a risk…Reality itself does not extort a Yes or No, a positive or a negative fundamental attitude…should I, then, surrender myself to what is not obvious, demonstrable, calculable? This is really a matter of trust or mistrust, in which I stake myself without security or guarantee. We may paraphrase the verb “to trust” in a variety of ways: either I believe reality sustains me and I trust it – or not; either I commit myself in principle to reality and rely on it – or not; either I regard reality therefore as trustworthy and reliable – or not; either I express my trust in reality – or not. Whatever way this fundamental decision goes, whatever kind of fundamental attitude is adopted, it is inescapable. Man is free. But he is not free to be free: “You must wager. There is no choice, you are already committed,” said Pascal. Jean Paul Sartre says that man is “condemned” to freedom, while others say that he is “called” to freedom…. in the long run it is impossible to remain undecided in regard to reality…. And not to choose is itself a choice…. In this vote of confidence, abstention means refusal of trust, a vote for mistrust. (p. 438f) It is beyond the purpose of this meditation to develop Küng’s presentation of fundamental trust which he affirms “means that a person, in principle, says Yes to the uncertain reality of himself and the world, making himself open to reality and able to maintain this attitude consistently in practice.” (p. 445) But I set it forth to point out that for Küng this is the pivot point from which he will build the whole structure of trust in Reality, in God, and in his case, the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ. Why do I stress this starting point for the building of a structure of trust in God? Precisely because this is the only option for us human beings whose whole existence has come under the scope of critical rationality that seeks empirical verification, scientific proof for all claims regarding reality. It is beyond my purpose to show, as does Küng, that there is a “faith dimension,” an “intuitive hunch” and model building even for those engaged in the respective scientific areas of research. It is enough for me to make the point as strongly as I can that Küng’s alternatives point to our human situation: either I express my trust in reality – or not. For me, the critical factor here is Küng’s extensive, intensive examination of “the God Question” which has emerged in the modern period as Karen Armstrong points out in The Case for God. She declares it; Küng documents it. She contends it is only in the practice of the presence of God – in meditation, liturgy, ritual, prayer – that God is revealed to us. And such practice emanates from a fundamental trust, not from a reasoned proof for the existence of God, let alone a God to be trusted, worshiped, and loved. © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 6   As I reflect back on my own journey, which was lived out very publicly in your presence, I realize how intensely I struggled to reason as far as reason would take me – no doubt, often to your despair. I remember well the comment someone made not so many years ago – “Why all his questions? At his age shouldn’t he have answers rather than questions?” I was never content to rest on “the tradition teaches,” or “the church teaches,” or, “the Bible says.” And because we never took the faith structure on authority but probed as honestly and diligently as humanly possible, I am ready to own that my whole life project is founded on a wager that carries risk: a fundamental trust in Reality, in God, the God I see revealed in the face of Jesus Christ – not the only revelation of God but my window to the Sacred, the Holy, the Mystery that is God. I know you do not demand such strenuous effort on my part; it is an inner demand to which I respond. But I know I could as well simply declare the biblical word which is our storybook. So often I turn to the poet who penned Ecclesiastes, one of the wisdom writings of the Hebrew Scriptures. The writer is so human in his wonderings, in his questions. For everything there is a season – a time we are born and a time we die, but he wonders – is that all there is? St Paul was sure there was more – for, in dealing with a practical issue regarding differing views of religious practice in the 14th chapter of Romans, he declares what for him was the ultimate truth, the last word as it were – We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. (Romans 14: 7-9) And then again from the Gospel of John, words purportedly from Jesus himself though I doubt that – it matters not. The fact is they found expression because of the impact of Jesus in life and death and presence beyond death made on the early Christian community – …I go to prepare a place for you…and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. (John 14:3) That is the biblical message – the wondering of the Hebrew poet, the assured declaration of the convert to Jesus Christ, St. Paul, the comforting assurance of the Gospel. It is in our being shaped by such scriptural affirmations that confidence is built and spiritual formation results in confident living and dying, living and dying marked by fundamental trust. © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 7   A recent book to which I have referred of late that has impressed me deeply is entitled Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. I am impressed with her work because she does intensive research and asks all the tough questions that a sceptic might raise. Her own witness as to what put her on the trail of research into the God question is, …I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks into our world and bends the laws of nature? Is there a being or intelligence who weaves together the living universe…? In the end, my questions boiled down to five words: Is there more than this? (p. 6) And after her long trail of exposure to all kinds of human experience that claimed some brush with the beyond in our midst, Hagerty concludes, I end with the question that launched my journey: Is there more than this? Yes, I believe there is, and the new science of spirituality buttresses my instinct. Science is showing that you and I are crafted with astonishing precision so that we can, on occasion, peer into a spiritual world and know God. The language of our genes, the chemistry of our bodies, and the wiring of our brain – these are the handiwork of One who longs to be known. And rather than dispel the spiritual, science is cracking it open for all to see. (p. 284) Her final sentence: We have all about us the fingerprints of God. (p. 285) A different kind of investigation than the rigorous philosophical theological overview of Hans Küng, but very significant as a contemporary witness to the fact that the God Question does not die away and even the latest science and technology is called in service of the quest. The December 31, 1999, issue of The Economist magazine ended as did every issue with a page marked “Obituary”– each issue taking note of the death of some prominent figure. This particular issue, called “millennium Issue” had as its subject God. A painting on the page, an artist’s rendering of God, had written beneath it in bold letters, “After a lengthy career, the Almighty recently passed into history. Or did he?” A decade later, Barbara Hagerty finds the fingerprints of God everywhere, not only in human experience but even in scientific research. The stories she tells of those who witness to an encounter with another dimension are not insignificant. As I was deciding on my meditation for this All Saints observance, I became aware of a Clint Eastwood movie just released entitled Hereafter. A review in the © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 8   October 18, 2010, Newsweek by David Ansen speaks of Eastwood’s “squinting” at the afterlife (p. 50). He writes, Clint Eastwood flirted with the supernatural in his allegorical Western Pale Rider, but nothing in his career prepares us for his haunting and haunted Hereafter, a bold, strange, problematic investigation into the nature of the afterlife. At 80, he continues to throw us curves, abandoning the safety of genre for an unconventionally structured story about mortality, loneliness, and the relationship between the living and the dead. The movie has a triple thread – three personal stories are woven together finally in a very moving affirmation of Hagerty’s conclusion that there is something more. In a portrayal that could well have been one of Hagerty’s stories, in the reviewer’s words: Caught in the tsunami is the first of the three characters whose fates Hereafter follows, a French television host (Cecile De France) who dies in the storm and then miraculously comes back to life. But her glimpse of the beyond makes it impossible for her to reenter her old life as a Parisian celebrity; instead, she becomes obsessed with writing a book about the eerily similar after-death experiences others have endured, a pursuit that costs her credibility in the eyes of her sophisticated friends. As her unhappy publisher notes, it’s a topic more suited to the American market. The second strand is played by Matt Damon who has the gift (he calls it a curse) to communicate with the dead, a gift/curse from which he tries to escape. The third story tells of a young boy whose twin brother is killed in an accident – a loss from which he cannot recover until the medium puts him in touch with his brother who counsels him to move on with his life. This happens in London where the child recognizes him and “knows” too that the medium who purchases the book of the journalist has made a “connection” with her. It is all very quiet, sober and reverent. The reviewer comments, “What keeps us rapt are the mysterious and provocative questions Hereafter raises, questions that Eastwood and Morgan (screenplay author) know can’t be definitively answered. Clearly, at this point in his life, questions of mortality aren’t far from Eastwood’s mind, and you can feel his identification with these characters, whose encounters with death both separate them from the rest of the living and give them a sense of urgent purpose. Damon, with his understated but deeply felt performance, and the wonderfully versatile De France supply the movie’s aching soul. And Eastwood keeps it honest. Hereafter confronts a topic that could have descended into mawkish, mystical hokum, but not in Eastwood’s no-nonsense, uncynical hands. He looks at death, and beyond, with clear, open, inquisitive eyes. © Grand Valley State University �Celebration of Life and Death Richard A. Rhem Page 9   Last evening Nancy and I viewed the film. I realize I take in something like that perhaps differently than most people. I’ve immersed myself in the God Question and “Is this all there is?” “Is there something more?” I think about little else. But I must say I was deeply moved by the movie. Barbara Hagerty’s closing sentence would be a fitting summary of the film as well: “We have all about us the fingerprints of God.” We have become aware recently of the tragedy of the suicide of young persons bullied because of their sexual orientation. In response to such tragedy there has been launched on the Internet a project that addresses the issue and tries to give hope and confidence to young people caught in the despair of alienation and suffering. It is called the “It Gets Better” project. Here we are again, another All Saints Day celebration. We celebrate life and death in community – the hymn “Borning Cry” was deliberately chosen you understand – The Good and Gracious God – there at our borning cry, there the day we were baptized watching our life unfold – childhood, adolescence, intimate relationship, middle age, and when evening gently closes in and we shut our weary eyes, I’ll be there as I have always been with just one more surprise. Not simply because the church teaches or the Bible says, not with arrogant dogmatism that masks insecurity, but with deep fundamental trust, I do believe this is not all there is. There is more to come. In no way do I imply thereby that life here and now is not good, a gift, a grace to be valued and savored. As a community we have come to love and live by Julian of Norwich’s affirmation: “All will be well, all will be well; all manner of things will be well.” The toast I learned from Duncan Littlefair – To the wonder, miracle, glory and joy of life! – is the way I’ve come to live my life. It is very good and, on this All Saints Eve, I suggest - it will get better! References: Karen Armstrong. The Case for God. Thorndike Press, 2009. Barbara Bradley Haggerty. Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Riverhead, 2009. Hereafter. Director, Clint Eastwood; Producer, Steven Spielberg, 2010. Hans Küng. On Being a Christian, 1976; Does God Exist?, 1978. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event All Saints Day Scripture Text Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Romans 14:1-9, John 14:1-3 Location The location of the interview Above & Beyond Banquet Hall, Norton Shores References Karen Armstrong. The Case for God, 2009. Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God:The Search for the Science of Spirituality, 2009. Hereafter. Director Clint Eastwood, 2010. Hans K Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20101031 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-10-31 Title A name given to the resource The Celebration of Life and Death in Community Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 31, 2010 entitled "The Celebration of Life and Death in Community", on the occasion of All Saints Day, at Above & Beyond Banquet Hall, Norton Shores. Scripture references: Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, Romans 14:1-9, John 14:1-3. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Meditation Practice of Spiritual Faith Ritual https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/787671df284084be4e5e6d3607827f62.pdf 3d86fe41e7a056ae445c203e628137a1 PDF Text Text The Human Hunger For God John 23: 1-10; Psalm 2; Acts 17: 22-28 Richard A. Rhem Unity Church Douglas, Michigan October 17, 2010 In his moving spiritual diary Markings, Dag Hammarskjold wrote, God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease being illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason. I was reminded of that statement recently as I read Karen Armstrong’s latest work The Case for God. “…a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.” Karen Armstrong points to the modern period as the time we lost the sense of “being illumined by the steady radiance” as Reason came to dominate the human endeavor. She is clear that human wellbeing depends on reason. It has brought the human family to its present state of accomplishment in arena after arena. She points to ancient cultures where reason, or the Greek word, logos, co-existed with myth or mythos. She writes: In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or “myth.” Today we live in a society of scientific logos, and myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a “myth” is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University   �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 2   different way. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. (p. xi) It was in the modern period with the stunning success of the scientific method, that myth, as the means of accessing the realm of mystery, was threatened and so many lost the experience of being illumined – that steady radiance the source of which is beyond all reason. Armstrong contends, During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythos of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity. (p. xv) As would be expected, religious truth cast in the mold of empirical, rational, historically verifiable truth could not succeed because its “truth” was of another sort, the experience of a reality beyond the limits of reason – in Hammarskjold’s words – “a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.” Thus rational religion bred modern atheism, Feuerbach, who saw God as a human projection, Marx who saw it as the opiate of the people, Freud who named it an illusion and the end of it, Nietzsche’s nihilism. In the 1960’s there were some American theologians who proclaimed the death of God. Thomas Altizer, William Hamilton, Paul Van Buren among others wrote of the end of God such that the April 10, 1966, issue of Time Magazine appearing during Holy Week came out with a black cover announcing the death of God. Even at present, there is a militant and angry atheism proclaimed by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. But, while their books sell, God’s obituary is premature. There is a counter movement wherein the © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 3   experience of God is being experienced not at the end of a reasoned discourse but in the practice of the Presence of God. Again, Karen Armstrong: Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. (p. xii) It is this perspective Karen Armstrong brings to the whole purview of religious history. The insight, wisdom and comfort of good religions is not the result of believing certain ‘truths’ or creedal propositions but disciplined practice. She points to the musician lost in her music or the dancer inseparable from the dance – a satisfaction, she contends, that goes deeper than merely ‘feeling good.’ It can lead to ‘ekstasis’ – a ‘stepping outside’ the norm. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth – or lack of it – only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade. (p. xiii) Deep within us, I do believe, is a hunger for God, a yearning for the experience – again in the words of Hammarskjold, “being illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.” Sometimes that yearning comes at the crisis moments of our lives. In another “God book” which I highly recommend, Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Fingerprints of God, she makes that point. She is NPR’s religion correspondent and, in that capacity, but also to come to an understanding of her own religious/spiritual experience, she did an exhaustive research project on human religious experience. In the opening pages she asks, Is there a certain set of circumstances, a certain personality type, a certain cocktail of internal and external stress, that erupts in a spiritual experience? …while an encounter with God can happen anywhere, anytime, my research and my own life story tell me that brokenness is the best predictor of spiritual experience. ( p. 12) © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 4   I’m not certain that is the case with the majority of those who witness to the experience of God, but there is no doubt that when we are driven to the extremity of life experiences, the ultimate questions seem to emerge – ultimate questions of “why?,” questions of meaning and purpose. Perhaps the classic biblical story reflecting such agonizing questioning is the drama of Job – not a historical person but a poetic drama that brings forth powerfully the question of suffering, suffering in Job’s case of one who lived righteously. The purpose of the story in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures is to refute the conventional thinking that one who suffers has brought it on through his or her sinfulness. Our Scripture reading from Job 23 has that powerful cry, Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! Job’s friends, the famous “miserable comforters,” beg him to confess his sin that he may be forgiven and healed but Job will not be intimidated. He has lived righteously. He has lived faithfully. He is suffering terribly and he has not a clue why that should be. Rather he would take his case before God, But that is the problem. God is not at one’s disposal I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. But he remains in the pain of his suffering with no bright flash of revelation. Yet, wrestling with God, he will not give in to hopeless despair. If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But then the tenacity of trust breaks through. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come out like gold. My intention is not to deal with the issue of this biblical writing – the mystery of suffering, suffering of the righteous. Rather I use it as an instance of that piercing cry, “Oh, that I knew where I might find God!” Whatever the particular circumstances, do we not all at some time or other find that longing in our hearts and minds? Sometimes the cry for God comes out of the horror and darkness we create as evidenced in the horrors of history. I know of no darkness so dark as that portrayed by the Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who chronicled his © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 5   experience in the Nazi concentration camp where he and his family were incarcerated. He titles it simply Night. He watched his mother and sister torn from him to become fuel for the gas ovens. He watched the wispy smoke of the oven stacks curl in the blue sky, knowing it was the residue of his own flesh and blood. He watched his father die slowly over weeks and months. He saw a child hung on a gallows in the concentration camp along with two men. The child had been tortured for a number of weeks in order to force him to reveal the names of those that might have been engaged in some revolt against the camp authority. The child would not mention one name and was therefore condemned to die. And so, as the custom was, the whole camp of prisoners was lined up in front of the gallows and the two men and the child in the middle. The three necks were placed at the same moment into nooses. ‘Long live liberty!’ cried the two adults. But the child was silent. ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over. Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. ‘Bare your heads!’ yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. ‘Cover your heads!’ Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive, their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light the child was still alive… For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not glazed. Behind me I heard the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows…’ That night the soup tasted like corpses. For the young Wiesel, God died that day. Yet somehow that deeply formed Jewish faith recovered. He has written, “I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.” And similarly he writes, And I became religious, even more so. The question to me was a double question. How come that I really became religious, more deeply than before? And the second one, how come I didn’t lose my sanity? I never divorced God. I couldn’t. I’m too Jewish…But I said to myself, ‘I do believe in God.’ But I have the right to protest against His ways. I have the right to be angry. And so, I do it a lot, very often, and I wouldn’t change a word of my discourse to God, my appeals to God, against God. Because I came to a © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 6   certain formulation saying a Jew or a man can be, can be religious or can come from a religious background, with God or against God but not without God. So I cannot live without God. (First Person Singular) Oh, that I knew where I might find God!, the ancient cry; with God or against God but not without God – Wiesel’s summary. A mystery indeed and one that defies our rational faculties to explain. What really can human reason, rational enquiry, do in the face of the horror of the Holocaust or in face of awful human loss as in the Job drama? Through the long human journey in all of the vicissitudes of human experience, faith has been lost, trust broken, anger expressed and protest made. Yet God will not go away; the human hunger will not be denied, the human cry persists: Oh, that I knew where I might find God! It is not always in a situation of awful darkness. Psalm 42 opens with a marvelous image: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. It seems the poet may have been in a situation of exile – separated from the faith community, from the temple, from the great festival celebrations and he misses it all terribly. He talks to himself Why are you cast down, O my soul, And why are you disquieted within me? And he tries to rally his spirit Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, My help and my God. One shaped and formed in deep religious experience, the sacred mediated in sacred space, sacred symbol, and faithful telling of the sacred story finds, cut off from that, a very great loss and hunger and a thirst As the deer longs for flowing streams, So my soul longs for you, O God. And it may be, not in an experience of darkness or an experience of lonely exile, but just a question arising out of our human awareness. Whence have we come, whether are we going, and what does it all mean? As Karen Armstrong notes, our rational deliberations are not helpful when we are dealing with the ultimate questions of our human existence. And we must feel our feelings; we cannot think our way around them. When we have exhausted all rational knowledge of our human situation, we realize that there is another dimension of which we are aware but which we cannot penetrate with a reasoned analysis. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 7   I read the passage from Acts 17, St Paul in Athens. Passionate new convert that he was, convinced the eternal God had now been finally revealed in the human face of Jesus and that history’s drama would soon be brought to consummation, he was distressed by the multitude of statuaries dedicated to a plethora of gods and goddesses. I find it fascinating that in Athens, the greatest university city in the ancient world, there co-existed a great variety of religious practice. St. Paul even quotes from the ancient Greek poets. The divine intention, Paul declares, regarding the human family, is That they would reach for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ As far back as we can probe, from the very beginning of the Human, men and women, tribes and peoples have been groping for God in whom we live and move and have our being. Thank God we have moved beyond the era of Enlightenment, which, for all of its impressive achievements, allowed only that to be true that could pass the test of empirical verification. The recent book Fingerprints of God by the NPR’s religious correspondent, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, to which I referred earlier, is a fascinating study of persons who have had an experience of God, mystical or out of body – some experience of the inbreaking into our space and time world of another dimension. Introducing her research she writes, I had come to suspect that there exists another type of spiritual reality just beyond the grasp of our human senses that occasionally, and often unexpectedly, pierces the veil of our physical world. (p. 2) After exhaustive research, really asking all the tough questions, Hagerty entitles her last chapter “Paradigm Shift.” She relates her experience at Cambridge University at a conference sponsored by the University and the Templeton Foundation. The questions addressed: Could God retain a place in the intelligent man’s world? Or, in this scientific age: Had God been reduced to a superstitious belief lacking any rational bases? (p. 268) I would point out that framing the question in that manner already fell into the Enlightenment Trap: a superstitious belief lacking any rational bases. After eight days of lectures Hagerty notes, God was losing. She writes, I was witnessing a blitzkrieg of scientific materialism overrunning the quaint but untestable claims of God. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 8   This irked, me, especially when I realized that God could not win under the rules of twenty-first-century science. This was not Ali versus Frazier. This was the World Wrestling Federation. The decks were stacked, the outcome certain, the smack-down inevitable. The rules of this game – the paradigm of modern science – revolve around certain core beliefs. One of them dictates that scientists can study only what they can measure: the physical world and observable behavior. Try to investigate something that cannot be precisely measured – such as a spiritual experience that transforms a person’s life – well, that’s cause for immediate disqualification. Another rule is the mind-brain paradigm: everything we are, see, feel, do, or think is a physical state, the electrical and chemical activity in three pounds of tissue called the brain. Mind, consciousness – forget about the soul – must be reduced to matter. It is a closed loop, excluding any notion of God or a spiritual realm. But on that rainy morning in Cambridge I witnessed something extraordinary, akin to Dorothy spotting the little bald man pulling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. For only a moment, the curtain pulled back and we saw the fight for what it was: two belief systems duking it out. John Barrow, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, was speed-walking us through the hypothesis of a “fine-tuned” universe that is exquisitely and astonishingly calibrated to allow for life. He explained the concept of “multiverses,” which posits that we live in one of 10,500 universes. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I’m quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe.” He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkin’s foot. (p. 269) After her intensive and extensive research, Hagerty asks, “Is there more than this?” She answers, “Yes, I believe there is, and the new science of spirituality buttresses my instinct. Science is showing that you and I are crafted with astonishing precision so that we can, on occasion, peer into a spiritual world and know God.” (p. 289) Her final sentence, “We have all about us the fingerprints of God.” “Oh, that I knew where I might find God!” to the beautiful image of the lonely Psalmist, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God,” to Paul groping around Athens where generations left evidence of their groping for God “in whom we live and move and have our being,” there is a continuity of the quest and a continuous witness to the experience of God – a universal hunger, a universal testimony of being touched by grace, even when the encounter was in protest as with Job or Wiesel, or in weeping and waiting as with the Psalmist, or © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �The Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 9   after a revelatory bolt of light as with Paul, or the inbreaking of another dimension to one surprised by grace. Karen Armstrong documents how the dominance of logos during the modern period brought on modern atheism and religious fundamentalism – two radical solutions in opposite directions. Thank God we have moved beyond those two alternatives. She points out repeatedly that religion is not primarily something people thought but something they did. Its truth is acquired in practical action. That is why you gather here on the first day of the week. That is why in our own individual practice we pray, we meditate, we participate in liturgy and sacrament. We open our lives to the dimension beyond our grasp, beyond our capacity to penetrate but which now and again, here or there, illumines us with “the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.” References: Karen Armstrong. The Case for God. Thorndike Press, 2009. Barbar Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Riverhead, 2009. Elie Wiesel. Night. Hill and Wang; Revised edition, 2006. Elie Wiesel. First Person Singular. PBS DVD Video, 2002. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Unity Church, Douglas, MI Scripture Text John 23:1-10, Psalm 2, Acts 17:22-28 Location The location of the interview Unity Church, Douglas References Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 2009. Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, 2009 Elie Wiesel. Night, 2002, First Person Singular, PBS DVD Video, 2002. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20101017 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-10-17 Title A name given to the resource The Human Hunger for God Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 17, 2010 entitled "The Human Hunger for God", on the occasion of Unity Church, Douglas, MI, at Unity Church, Douglas. Scripture references: John 23:1-10, Psalm 2, Acts 17:22-28. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Presence of God Spiritual Dimension https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/01fb029b393a32def70631e8ec754768.pdf dcd043a21eb12773246220e90eb740d7 PDF Text Text The Religious Quest: Groping for the God in Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan September 26, 2010 Prepared text of the sermon On April 29 I e-mailed our gracious host, Tapas, today’s theme. He began very early to harass me for the three themes for the summer series. (I don’t mention that after receiving them he loses them!) This is what I e-mailed him: Good morning, Tapas. ...after sleepless nights, much prayer and fasting, coming to the brink of despair, here is the third installment…(Well that may be a bit overdrawn. One shouldn’t be frivolous about things of ultimate concern!): The Religious Quest: groping for the God in whom we live and move and have our being. What has Athens to say to Jerusalem and vice versa? What has the premodern to say to the modern and vice versa? What has the post-modern to say to the modern and vice versa? A fascinating dimension of human reality is the God question or the religious question or the spiritual quest and question. Perhaps we can come to some clarity about our present as we review and reflect on the way we as humans have evolved in our search for meaning, for a place where our heart can rest and our mind remain open – a place of spiritual peace and intellectual integrity, the consequence of which would be global community marked by compassion. Last month my theme was “Whose Truth Are You Living? By What Authority?” I’m trying to recall what moved me in that direction. I had addressed those questions in sermons in the past, but I think the immediate catalyst was the novel I referred to last month, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, the story of a young Brahmin who strikes out on a journey to find the truth. From asceticism to lust and ease to coming finally to his own Truth out of despair and solitude, Siddhartha found his soul. Though he greatly admired the Buddha whom he met, he realized simply following the Buddha’s teaching was not enough, for his breakthrough insight was that experience – the experience of enlightenment – cannot be taught. It must come to one amidst the quest – an epiphany in which one “sees,” one “knows” beyond any rational or dogmatic system. © Grand Valley State University   �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 2   The reason I wondered about what made me write the paragraph above is because since deciding on that theme I have been introduced and have read the following books: The Language God Talks, Herman Wouk; This Is My God, Herman Wouk; The Fingerprints of God, Barbara Hagerty; How God Changes Your Brain, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman; The Case for God, Karen Armstrong. With the exception of Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God, I had never heard of the four books nor did I go looking for them as references for today. What is almost spooky to me is that I wrote the above paragraph, I suppose, because it is and has long been the quest of my whole being, and then am introduced to those five volumes, all of which speak to my announced theme. Had I had the books in my possession, had I read them before I wrote the paragraph, the theme announced today would have reflected those resources to which to turn. But to announce a theme and then stumble on such rich resources is quite remarkable. Serendipity? Providence? Or maybe there is a God who watches over poor preachers on the edge of senility. Actually I go into this because the recent reading I’ve done has raised some fascinating questions about the human mind or soul and the dimension of Mystery that lies beyond our capacity to know through the exercise of our reason, our rational faculties. Is there a “knowing” beyond knowing? In ordinary lives, our space and time world? That is, is there more to reality than can be accessed by the use of human reason? In light of my experience just related, was there something at work in me beyond that of which I was aware when I decided to address the ancient question, “What has Athens to say to Jerusalem?” I am not at all aware of being, nor have I ever claimed to be, clairvoyant. As for mystical experience, my confession has always been I’ve never had a tingle in my pinkie. Yet I confess I am beginning to wonder. It could be pure coincidence that I write a paragraph about what I want to address five months later and then, without making any effort, I am introduced to five books that address my question more fully and poignantly than I could ever imagine. And it is not simply the “coincidence” to which I am pointing but that the respective books moved me in a direction that causes me even to raise this question. In other words, I got more than I bargained for and find myself quite surprised. It has made me go back over the years and reflect on the way I have come. © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 3   I have spoken of the struggle I had come to after seven years of pastoral ministry. My theology did not fit life as I was experiencing it as a pastor. My European study was an attempt to gain the education I had been too closed to gain while in college and seminary. I quake today as I realize I took my family including three small children to Europe, having arranged for a short-term lease on an apartment in Dordrecht knowing I would not remain there because there was no university there, but not knowing where I would go. A couple months before we left for The Netherlands I met Professor Hendrikus Berkhof at Kennedy airport in New York. Jammed into a shuttle that took him from one terminal to another, we talked about the possibility of studying with him at Leiden. That was my only contact with him. He gave me his telephone number and invited me to call him when I arrived in The Netherlands, which I did. We made an appointment. I relate this because of an experience I had the day I met him in his study which was in his home. As I got up to leave, I noticed a piece of paper pinned on the drape that separated the study from the rest of the house. On the paper was a verse printed on a mimeograph machine – in typical blue ink like I had used in grade school. The lines were from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s hymn “Strong Son of God, Immortal Love:” Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they. I get goose bumps relating the incident because that day I knew I had found my teacher and today I can tell you those lines express beautifully and concisely what I experienced over the following four years of graduate study and the subsequent forty years of my theological, philosophical, spiritual quest to the present. Those lines were an illumination for me in a deeply personal, spiritual expression. My freedom to wonder, to probe, to re-imagine came through lines that were a prayer, indeed, a personal address to God. The other evening as the sun was setting in golden glory I was, as usual, sitting on our bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, and I began to sing those beloved lines. I became so aware of the significance of my “chance” reading of those lines on my Professor’s study drape and of this presentation this morning where I would attempt to speak of the God in whom we live and move and have our being. The God in whom we live and move and have our being. That is from St. Paul recorded in Acts 17:28 quoting “some of your own poets”– the intellectuals of Athens gathered on Mars Hill to hear what St. Paul had to say about Jesus and the resurrection. He was preaching the Gospel – “telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.” In his commentary on Acts, William Barclay paints the picture: © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Athens had long since left behind her great days of action but she was still the greatest university town in the world, to which men seeking learning came from all over the world. She was a city of many gods. It was said that there were more statues of the gods in Athens than in all the rest of Greece put together, and that in Athens it was easier to meet a god than a man. In the great city square people met to talk, for in Athens they did little else. The days of action were past and now man talked all day and half the night about the newest idea. So Paul would have no difficulty in getting someone to talk to. The philosophers discovered him. There were the Epicureans. We may sum up their beliefs in this way. (i) They believed that everything happened by chance. (ii) They believed that death was the end of all. (iii) They believed that there were gods but the gods were remote from the world and did not care. (iv) They believed that pleasure was the chief end of man. They did not mean fleshly and worldly and material pleasure; for the highest pleasure was the pleasure that brought no pain to follow. There were the Stoics. We may sum up their beliefs in this way. (i) They believed that literally everything was God. God was fiery spirit. That spirit grew blunt and dull in matter but it was in everything. What gave men life was that a little spark of that spirit dwelt in them and when they died it returned to God. But for the Stoic everything was God. (ii) They believed that everything was fated because everything was the will of God; and therefore whatever happened we must not care. It is God’s will and must be accepted. (iii) They believed that every so many years the world disintegrated in a conflagration and then started all over again on the same story. They took Paul to the Areopagus which is the Greek for Mars’ Hill. It was the name both of the hill and the court that met on it. I selected this story from Acts because one finds set forth there two philosophical schools of thought and, over against those two Greek philosophical schools, the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, a religious/spiritual expression by St. Paul. Thus philosophical discourse engaging religious claim and vice versa. My intention is not to focus on Paul’s claim nor the philosophical discussions of the Epicureans and Stoics. Rather I use this passage from Acts to indicate the setting and background of the famous question raised by the Early Church Father Tertullian – “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian was a lawyer who converted to Christ before the end of the second century C.E. One citation will give a sense of Tertullian’s thinking. For philosophy is the material of the world’s wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 5   had himself taught that the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with all attempts to produce a Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic Christianity! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after receiving the gospel! When we believe, we desire no further belief. For this is our first article of faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides. (Tertullian, Heretics, (Stevenson, 166-167) from Phoenicia.org. There you have it – two thousand years ago, the Jewish/Christian theologian, Paul, in the wake of his experience of the risen, ascended Jesus whom he now believed to be the Christ, the Messiah, engaged with the intellectuals of Athens – the greatest university city in the world – in dialogue/debate/conversation about God – he speaking from the Revelation he had experienced and clung to in faith, and the Athenians, in customary mode, weighing his claims in the context of the long tradition of Greek philosophical inquiry through the exercise of human reason. And a century and a half later the Latin lawyer from Carthage, Tertullian, drew the line sharply – an either/or – human reason expressed in philosophical categories had no place in Gospel given by revelation and embraced by faith. And of course the God question didn’t arise with Paul in Athens two thousand years ago. On Mars Hill he cites the Greeks’ own poets – a tradition stemming back to earlier centuries – the Epicureans claiming the human existence ended in extinction or the Stoics looking to eventual absorption into God. And how long before that was the mark of the human that he or she was groping for God? Perhaps with the dawn of human consciousness, the earliest beginning of selfconsciousness, of awareness, of awe and wonder before the presence of the Mystery of Being. As indicated above, when I wrote the paragraph announcing today’s theme, I had not read Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God. But reading it I found she has addressed precisely my questions following on “What has Athens to say to Jerusalem?”: “What has the pre-modern to say to the modern and vice versa?; “What has the post-modern to say to the modern and vice versa?” And further, she addresses explicitly what I hoped would be the result of our inquiry – to come to some clarity about our present…our search for meaning, for a place where our heart can rest and our mind remain open – a place of spiritual peace and intellectual integrity. That search has marked my whole life since opening up to critical thinking in regard to my religious faith. The “heart” and “mind” issue was articulated most concisely for me in a little work on Christology by Professor John Knox –The Humanity and Divinity of Christ. I refer to it here not because the Christological discussion – a discussion of the pre-existence of Jesus – is relevant to our theme, © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 6   but because Knox expressed so clearly the human quest for understanding that engages both heart and mind when confronted with a religious claim beyond human reason. If neither the rejection nor the modification of kenosis is a possibility for us, nor yet its acceptance as a plain statement of fact, it is clear that we must receive the story as story and then interpret it as best we can, in rational and empirical terms, knowing all the while that we shall not exhaust in our interpretation what the story says and only the story can say, but also knowing that without the effort at interpretation the story will say precisely nothing at all. For a story like this can speak to us of matters beyond our understanding only if it has also spoken to our understanding – and, within the limits of our powers, been understood. There are two conditions under which a significant symbol loses (or, perhaps better, is shown to have lost) its vitality and power. One of these is when our hearts no longer need it, when all we want to say or need to say (or to have said to us) can be said without it. The other is when our minds, failing to discern in it the coherency of truth, are forced to reject it. For our hearts cannot finally find true what our minds find false. If they could, we should be hopelessly divided and any firm grasp of reality would be impossible. What we mean by ‘the heart’ in this connection is not something alien or counter to the mind, but is the mind itself quickened and extended. The wisdom the heart has found, if it be wisdom and not fantasy, is the same wisdom the mind all the while has been feeling after, if haply it might find it. It is a wisdom which, far from by-passing the understanding, enters through the doors of it, fills and stretches the space of it, and only then breaks through and soars above it. (The Humanity and Divinity of Christ, p. 106f) It was Eastertide, 1992, and my sermon series was “From Proclaimer to the One Proclaimed” and I was struggling with the Christological puzzle. In his little volume Knox charted the early Church’s attempts to express the mystery of Jesus Christ, resurrected, ascended Lord. That was very helpful for me but the real “gift” was his statement, For our hearts cannot finally find true what our minds find false. A similar statement, his or some other’s, states it simply as The heart cannot rest where the mind cannot follow. If John Knox put the matter concisely, Karen Armstrong puts the God question, the whole human spiritual endeavor, in the context of the whole human story in her The Case for God. The persons, schools, movements to which she points and which she discusses have long been familiar to me through long years of © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 7   theological work. But the picture she paints, the story she tells casts a fresh light on the whole human effort of “groping after God.” The book is divided into two parts. Part I deals with “The Unknown God,” covering the centuries from 30,000 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E. Part II explains “The Modern God” (1500 C.E. to the present). Each part is divided into six chapters and there is an Introduction and Epilogue. There is a richness and fullness in the story she tells and I will in no way give a full analysis of the work. What I do hope to do is lift up what is so striking in her work as it relates to our present theme – the relation of the heart to the mind, faith to reason, religion as a way of life and practice and religion as a rational dogmatic system to be assented to by our reason. With voluminous documentation, Armstrong establishes her major thesis that historically, from the earliest evidence of religious activity until the advent of the modern period, religious practice as ritual found transcendence in myth. She notes that many date the beginning of the modern period with Columbus’ voyage in 1492. While still a solidly Christian nation with Catholic monarchs, Spain was in an age of transition. Armstrong writes, The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but the traditional myths of religion still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations. (p. 162) But that would change in the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the early breakthroughs in the investigations of the natural sciences, for example the work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Armstrong gives a rich picture of the interplay of reforming religion – Catholic and Protestant and the unlocking of the secrets of the universe. I have moved quickly from the earliest evidence of human religious practice to the beginnings of the modern period, because it was at that point that religious practice changed. And it is the change of religious practice that has brought us to the present unhappy place of aggressive, dogmatic fundamentalism and equally aggressive, militant atheism. Our author sets the stage for this unfortunate religious development in the Introduction with reference to the two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge in the premodern cultures: In most premodern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was considered superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary. Each had its own sphere of competence, and it was considered unwise to mix the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 8   efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species. But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or “myth.” Today we live in a society of scientific logos, and myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a “myth” is something that is not true. But in the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy; rather, like logos, it helped people to live effectively in our confusing world, though in a different way. Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos. Myth has been called a primitive form of psychology. When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behavior. People had to enter the warren of their own minds and fight their personal demons. When Freud and Jung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time. (p. xi) This is not new information from Karen Armstrong. She gives a full treatment of the role of mythology in her A Short History of Myth (2005). But she brings us to our present situation in regard to theology and institutional religious practice by documenting the place of logos and mythos. She points out that a myth was not something one simply “believed in.” It became effective only as a program of action. “It could put you in the correct spiritual or psychological posture, but it was up to you to take the next step and make the ‘truth’ of the myth a reality in your own life.” (p. xii) But if we failed to apply it to our situation, a myth would remain abstract and incredible. From a very early date, people reenacted their myths in stylized ceremonies that worked aesthetically upon participants and, like any work of art, introduced them to a deeper dimension of existence. Myth and ritual were thus inseparable, so much so that it is often a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical story or the rites attached to it. Without ritual, myths made no sense and would remain as opaque as a musical score, which is impenetrable to most of us until interpreted instrumentally. © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page 9   Religion, therefore, was not primarily something that people thought but something they did. Its truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing texts or recipes. (p. xii) It is this perspective Karen Armstrong brings to the whole purview of religious history. The insight, wisdom and comfort of good religions is not the result of believing certain ‘truths” or creedal propositions but disciplined practice. She points to the musician lost in her music or the dancer inseparable from the dance – a satisfaction, she contends, that goes deeper than merely “feeling good.” It can lead to “ekstasis”– a “stepping outside” the norm. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. This will be one of the major themes of this book. It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth – or lack of it – only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline. Some people will be better at it than others, some appallingly inept, and some will miss the point entirely. But those who do not apply themselves will get nowhere at all. Religious people find it hard to explain how their rituals and practices work, just as a skater may not be fully conscious of the physical laws that enable her to glide over the ice on a thin blade. (p. xiii) For those who engage in religious practice – meditating, participation in liturgy and ritual-witness to the discovery of a transcendent dimension of life - that has been a fact of human life, but it was impossible to explain what that transcendent dimension was in terms of logos. However, she writes: This imprecision was not frustrating, as a modern Western person might imagine, but brought with it an ekstasis that lifted practitioners beyond the constricting confines of self. Our scientifically oriented knowledge seeks to master reality, explain it, and bring it under the control of reason, but a delight in unknowing has also been part of the human experience. Even today, poets, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists find that the contemplation of the insoluble is a source of joy, astonishment, and contentment. Armstrong cites the early Daoists who saw religion as a “knack” acquired by constant practice. Speaking of our own situation, she suggests we have not been doing our practice and have lost the “knack” of religion. The origin of our dilemma lies in the modern period. © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page10   During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a time that historians call the early modern period, Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilization, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible. As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythos of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally, and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as “believers,” as though accepting orthodox dogma “on faith” were their most important activity. (p. xv) That paragraph really expresses the heart of Armstrong’s contention as she addresses our contemporary situation with The Case for God. She does a marvelous job of describing the rise of modernity as it emerged from the late medieval period – the early development of the scientific method, the inductive method of empirical research and experimentation. She chronicles with clarity the triumph of logos in the mastering of the natural world, the growing consensus that logos was the sole means of acquiring true knowledge and how, in turn, the theologians sought by means of rational thought to express religious truth. Such a move by the religious scholars to abandon mythical thinking and seek to establish God-talk and spiritual reality by means of the canons of human reason – while understandable given the climate of opinion of modernity, especially the Enlightenment – was a disaster for it is an impossibility. And, further, it has led to the rejection of the spiritual dimension of our human experience and the abandonment of religious practice wherein the human family had found hope, comfort and healing. She describes the consequences of the move in the modern age of religious discourse from myth to reason. This rationalized interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the twentieth century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favor of logos, Christian fundamentalists have interpreted scripture with a literalism that © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page11   is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the United States, protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as “creation science” that regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis. (p.xv) Armstrong points out that atheism is rarely “a blanket denial of the sacred per se” but most often a rejection of some particular conception of the Divine. This can be demonstrated in the rise of classical Western atheism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as its present expression. Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period. The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused exclusively on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion. This has weakened their critique, because fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend. But the “new atheists” command a wide readership, not only in secular Europe but even in the more conventionally religious United States. The popularity of their books suggests that many people are bewildered and even angered by the God concept they have inherited. (p. xvi) But the whole broad picture of human knowing has undergone and is undergoing a major shift in understanding. Our era has no name except “post-modernity”. Obviously the label points to the contention that we as a human family in the pursuit of truth, knowledge of our world, have moved beyond the assumptions of the modern age with its certainty of logos as the only and final arbiter of truth. She explains: Philosophy, theology, and mythology have always responded to the science of the day, and a philosophical movement has developed since the 1980s that has embraced the indeterminacy of the new cosmology. Postmodern thinking is heir to Hume and Kant in its assumption that what we call reality is constructed by the mind and that all human understanding is therefore interpretation rather than the acquisition of accurate, objective information. From this it follows that no single vision can be sovereign; that our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute; and that truth is inherently ambiguous. Received ideas that © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page12   are the products of a particular historical and cultural milieu must, therefore, be stringently deconstructed. But this analysis must not be based on any absolute principle, and there is no assurance that we will ever arrive at – or even approximate – a wholly accurate version of the truth. Fundamental to postmodern thought is the conviction that instead of ideologies mirroring external conditions, the world is profoundly affected by the ideology that human beings impose upon it. We are not forced by sense data to adopt a particular worldview, so we have a choice in what we affirm – as well as an immense responsibility. (p. 311) That is a major shift! Armstrong cites an Italian postmodernist, Vattimo, who has focused on the French thinker Derrida’s later work. Vattimo argues that from the beginning religion had recognized that it was “an essentially interpretive discourse: it had traditionally proceeded by endless deconstructing its sacred texts, so that from the start it had the potential to liberate itself from metaphysical orthodoxy.” ( p. 313) Modernity, Vattimo believes, is over; when we contemplate history, we cannot now see the future as an inevitable and unilinear progression toward emancipation. Freedom no longer lies in the perfect knowledge of and conformity to the necessary structure of reality, but in an appreciation of multiple discourses and the historicity, contingency, and finitude of all religious, ethical, and political values – including our own. (p. 314) Postmodernity, the American philosopher John D. Caputo contends, should be “a more enlightened Enlightenment, that is no longer taken in by the dream of pure objectivity.” Armstrong concludes her chapter on “Death of God?” quoting Caputo: If modern atheism is the rejection of a modern God, then the delimitation of modernity opens up another possibility, less the resuscitation of premodern theism than the chance of something beyond both the theism and the atheism of modernity. (p. 317) Armstrong concludes the section, “…how best can we move beyond premodern theism into a perception of ”God” that truly speaks to all the complex realities and needs of our time?” And she begins her Epilogue with the statement, “Religion was never supposed to provide answers to questions that lay within the reach of human reason.” (p. 318) Underscoring the point made throughout the study, “Religion is a practical discipline, and its insights are not derived from abstract speculation but from spiritual exercises and a dedicated lifestyle.” (p. 318) But she anticipates the question that will inevitably arise – “Are we doomed to the perpetual regression of postmodern thought?” (p. 327) She answers, © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page13   Perhaps the only viable “natural theology” lies in religious experience. By this, of course, I do not mean fervid emotional piety. We have seen that in the past scholars and spiritual directors had little time for this religious positivism. Instead of seeking out exotic raptures, Schleiermacher, Bultmann, Rahner, and Lonergan have all suggested that we should explore the normal workings of our minds and notice how frequently these propel us quite naturally into transcendence. Instead of looking for what we call God “outside ourselves” (foris) in the cosmos, we should, like Augustine, turn within and become aware of the way quite ordinary responses segue into “otherness.” We have seen how the inherent finitude of language was regularly exploited by teachers like Denys to make the faithful aware of the silence we encounter on the other side of speech. It has been well said that music, which, as we saw at the beginning of this book, is a “definitively” rational activity, is itself a “natural theology.” In music the mind experiences a pure, direct emotion that transcends ego and fuses subjectivity and objectivity. As Basil explained, we can never know the ineffable ousia of God but can glimpse only its traces or effects (energeiai) in our time-bound, sensebound world. It is clear that the meditation, yoga, and rituals that work aesthetically on a congregation have, when practiced assiduously over a lifetime, a marked effect on the personality – an effect that is another form of natural theology. There is no dramatic “born-again” conversion but a slow, incremental, and imperceptible transformation. Above all, the habitual practice of compassion and the Golden Rule “all day and every day” demands perpetual kenosis. The constant “stepping outside” of our own preferences, convictions, and prejudices is an ekstasis that is not a glamorous rapture but, as Confucius’s pupil Yan Hui explained, is itself the transcendence we seek. The effect of these practices cannot give us concrete information about God; it is certainly not a scientific “proof.” But something indefinable happens to people who involve themselves in these disciplines with commitment and talent. This “something” remains opaque to those who do not undergo these disciplines, however, just as the Eleusinian “mystery” sounded trivial and absurd to somebody who remained obstinately outside the cult hall and refused to undergo the initiation. ( p. 327f) In these two citations, Armstrong readily acknowledges that these practices give us no “concrete information about God”– no scientific “proof.” Nonetheless she points to the effects of the disciplined practice of religious exercises. That that is in fact the case has been documented. As I began I listed the books that fell serendipitously into my hands. One of them by Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman is entitled How God Changes Your Brain. It is beyond my purpose to deal with the neurological research set forth in this work. The author’s research gives them no basis for affirming or denying the existence of God. What © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page14   they do do as neural scientists is map the brain registering the physical response in the brains of various persons and groups as they are actually engaged in meditation, contemplation – in some form of spiritual practice. In the opening pages of the book, Newberg gives a concise summary of what he and his colleagues are about. Along with my research staff at the University of Pennsylvania and the Center for Spirituality and the Mind, we are currently studying Sikhs, Sufis, yoga practitioners, and advanced meditators to map the neurochemical changes caused by spiritual and religious practices. Our research has led us to the following conclusions: 1. Each part of the brain constructs a different perception of God. 2. Every human brain assembles its perceptions of God in uniquely different ways, thus giving God different qualities of meaning and value. 3. Spiritual practices, even when stripped of religious beliefs, enhance the neural functioning of the brain in ways that improve physical and emotional health. 4. Intense, long-term contemplation of God and other spiritual values appears to permanently change the structure of those parts of the brain that control our moods, give rise to our conscious notions of self, and shape our sensory perceptions of the world. 5. Contemplative practices strengthen a specific neurological circuit that generates peacefulness, social awareness, and compassion for others. Spiritual practices also can be used to enhance cognition, communication, and creativity, and over time can even change our neurological perception of reality itself. Yet, it is a reality that we cannot objectively confirm. Instead, our research has led us to conclude that three separate realities intermingle to give us a working model of the world: the reality that actually exists outside of our brain, and two internal realities – maps that our brain constructs about the world. One of these maps is subconscious and primarily concerned with survival and the biological maintenance of the body. But this map is not the world itself; it’s just a guide that helps us navigate the terrain. Human beings, however, construct a second internal reality – a map that reflects our conscious awareness of the universe. This consciousness is very different from the subconscious map formed by our sensory and emotional circuits. We know that these two internal maps exist, but we have yet to discover if, and to what degree, these two inner realities communicate with each other. Overall, our consciousness represents a reality that is the farthest removed from the world that actually exists outside of the brain. Thus, if God does © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page15   exist, there would be three separate realities to consider: the God that exists in the world, our subconscious perception of that God, and the conscious images and concepts that we construct in a very small part of our frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. It has been my goal to show that spiritual practices may help us to bridge the chasm between these inner and outer realities, which would then bring us closer to what actually exists in the world. I still don’t know if it’s possible, but the health benefits associated with meditation and religious ritual cannot be denied. (p. 6) Interestingly, in an Epilogue entitled, “Is God Real?”, Newberg writes more personally about the God question. For those who embark on a spiritual journey, God becomes a metaphor reflecting their personal search for Truth. It is a journey inward toward self-awareness, salvation or enlightenment, and for those who are touched by this mystical experience, life becomes more meaningful and rich. Personally, I believe there has to be an absolute truth about the universe. I don’t know what it is, but I am driven to seek it, using science, philosophy, and spirituality as my guide… …I harbor the hope and feeling that God or some ultimate reality, in whatever form it may take, actually exists. I don’t know if my intuition is true, but I am quite comfortable with my uncertainty. (p. 246) Barbara Bradley Hagerty was not “comfortable with her uncertainty.” She set out on a serious quest to research the God question, engaging with persons who have had experience of another dimension, of God, of being transported into another realm of reality, as well as those pursuing the science of brain research in relation to spiritual experience. She is NPR’s award-winning religion correspondent and was formerly a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor and thus combines a journalist’s research and writing skills. The end product of her intensive research is the book Fingerprints of God (2009). A review in Publishers Weekly expresses the terrain covered by Hagerty concisely. National Public Radio correspondent Hagerty acts as a tour guide through the rocky terrain of scientists who study religious experience. Is there a socalled God gene? Why do some people have mystical experiences while others never see the so-called light? Yet to each interview, whether with a world-renowned neuroscientist or a back-road mystic, [Hagerty] brings a suitably skeptical eye. Along the way, she manages to explain some pretty cutting-edge science – psychoneuroimmunology, anyone? – and unravel some people’s pretty hard-to-comprehend religious experiences without sacrificing depth or complexity. Then, with equal aplomb, she dances off to peyote ceremonies, church service and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The real beauty of this book lies in watching Hagerty gracefully balance © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page16   her own trust in faith and science and, in the end, come down with one foot planted firmly in both.” That says it well; this is an exceptional study in my opinion. Seldom has one gone “groping after God” with such passionate engagement combined with intellectual integrity. Barbara Hagerty’s heart would not rest where her mind could not follow. Deep yearning to believe that the experiences of another dimension breaking into our space-time world are indeed the fingerprints of God, has not kept her from asking the tough questions and acknowledging the limits of scientific proof when focused on the question of the existence of God. She finally wrote her book because she couldn’t keep the questions at bay. And yet I could not keep the questions at bay. Is there another reality that occasionally breaks into our world and bends the laws of nature? Is there a being or intelligence who weaves together the living universe, and if so, does He, She, or It fit the description I have been given? I was not worried about losing the old man with a beard – but what about the young man on a cross? Is there a spiritual world every bit as real as the phone ringing in the kitchen or my dog sitting on my foot, a dimension that eludes physical sight and hearing and touch? In the end, my questions boiled down to five words: Is there more than this? (p. 6) Is there more than this? That is the question that drives those who long for some sign of a greater Reality that embraces us, yet insist on living with more than wishful thinking. Barbara Hagerty was raised in a very positive and powerful Christian Science family environment but in her mid-thirties she left the practice of Christian Science, yet holding “to the idea of God, of a creator above and within this messy creation called my life and yours.” Researching a story on the Saddleback Church in California she had a powerful mystical experience – “…I was engulfed by a presence I could feel but not touch…Those few moments, the time it takes to boil water for tea, reoriented my life. The episode left a mark on my psyche that I bear to this day.” (p. 5). And thus her book Fingerprints of God. This book tackles the existence of God, “the reality of the unseen,” as psychologist William James had it. After talking to countless scientists far more knowledgeable and insightful than I, I have concluded that science cannot prove God – but science is entirely consistent with God. It all depends on how you define “God.” If you are trying to locate deity in a thirty-three-year-old carpenter or the unseen divider of the Red Sea, science will offer no help. But if you look for God in the math of the universe, if your perceive God as the Mind that rigged existence to create life, then science can indeed accommodate. If you see God in the breathtaking complexity of our brains, as the architect of our bodies and © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page17   our minds who planted the question Is there more? – well, science has room for that kind of God. (p. 11f) The book deserves a full treatment in its own right but that is beyond the limits of this presentation. I bring in Hagerty’s research and conclusions as a confirmation of all we have learned from Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God. Recounting a great mass of personal experiences she learned of by interviewing persons with spiritual/mystical experiences, Hagerty begins to formulate the conclusions to which she is coming through conversation with a variety of scholars whose focus and research deal with the experiences that break the mold of materialism and its absolute denial of another dimension of reality. From a lecture by Francis Collins, one of the country’s leading geneticists and head of the Human Genome Project, Hagerty writes, “God” may not be, as the atheists have it, a delusion – but perhaps a conclusion driven by the math of the universe. The infinite intelligence that maintains the planets in their orbits and tailors the molecular composition of air to each breath we take – this intelligence is not the figment of a narrow fundamentalist mind but the property of the most rigorous scientific minds. This is a God who makes sense to me, a defensible God, and one who has a starring role in a new batch of scientific experiments. (p. 246) Continuing in this chapter entitled “A New Name for God,” she brings in the ideas of Larry Dossey. Imagine stripping God of all His imagery. Gone is the throne, the beard, the Michelangelo painting of a majestic Being nearly touching Adam’s finger with the spark of life. Gone, too, are the stories of a God who intervened, who favored a certain people, who assumed the physique of a man. This stripped-down version would be the sum of his attributes, which would include infinite information, an omnipresence that fills all space and connects all atoms, a taste for mathematics that keeps the planets in their orbit, and the power to do so. This is a God who might appeal to the concrete thinking of a scientist. I came to think of this as “God 1.0” – God minus the love and the narrative history. Larry Dossey calls this God “non-local mind.” Dossey, a doctor and author, coined the term in his 1989 book Recovering the Soul. It bears more than a smart scientific ring. “Non-locality” is a staple of quantum mechanics, and one of the spookier aspects of physics. For Dossey and others on the edge of science, “non-local mind” refers to a consciousness that defies the bounds of space or time. © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page18   “Perhaps the place to start is to say that non-locality is simply a fancified word for infinitude,” Dossey told me one luminous day in July 2006. “If consciousness is non-local, then it is infinite in space and time. If something is infinite in space, it’s omnipresent. If it’s infinite in time, it’s eternal, or immortal. So you can see that from the get-go there’s theological dynamite that’s hooked up with this idea of non-local mind.” … What he proposes is a revolution in science. If non-local mind were merely the equivalent of the Divine Watchmaker, who created the universe and then let it tick away on its own, the idea would unsettle fewer of his colleagues. But Dossey’s claim is far more galling: he suggests that his non-local mind interacts – has a relationship, even – with a person’s individual, local mind, in the same way that many Christians or Jews believe that God interacts with people. According to Dossey and a growing number of scientists (along with most of the American population), this cosmic consciousness permeates our world and soaks into our human affairs. Think of your “local” mind as your personal computer. You can keep files and write documents that no one else can access. “Non-local” mind is like the Internet: it contains enormous amounts of information, shared by billions of people (potentially by everyone on earth), and is always available for you to access with your individual mind. Dossey theorizes that your consciousness shares qualities with non-local mind, that the local and the infinite are “two sides of the same coin.” This may seem far-fetched until you begin reading the mystics or practicing meditation or listening to anyone who has enjoyed a profoundly spiritual experience. They witness to being “at one” with the universe and God, feeling the boundlessness of the infinite, and experiencing “the divine within.” And if there is a dialogue, so to speak, between your mind and the larger non-local mind, then it follows that your mind could do things that modern science says is impossible, such as impact other minds or know things that you simply should not know. … “One of the things that scientists have had a difficult time doing is to imagine how consciousness might behave non-locally.” Dossey observed. “That it might exert its effects beyond the individual brain and the body, as in the stuff that parapsychology deals with, like ESP, clairvoyance, this sort of thing. And, we must add, intercessory prayer, which has always been a claim of all major religions. So it has been verboten to suggest that this actually happens, that the mind can behave non-locally, because every respectable scientist is dragooned into the notion that, by definition, that can’t happen.” (pp. 246-248) © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page19   Following on her discussion about Dossey, Hagerty relates another fascinating conversation with Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Dean Radin has a hypothesis: We have “entangled minds.” Hagerty quotes Radin. “Early on I was attracted to the notion that there were multiple layers to any story,” he recalled, gazing out his window at the mountains surrounding the IONS compound, a wilderness paradise some forty miles north of San Francisco. “I never forgot that virtually anything that people are presenting to you, even in science, has multiple levels of meaning.” This intuition – that there may be a hidden reality – led Radin to entanglement. The idea of entanglement is this: when you delve down to the subatomic or quantum level, particles remain connected even when they are apparently separated. Albert Einstein called these connections in quantum theory “spooky action at a distance.” When Einstein was alive, entanglement was only an idea that was predicted by mathematics, but it had not yet been demonstrated in the laboratory. That would begin to happen in the 1970s, when researchers first started to explore whether the predicted properties of entanglement could be observed in the laboratory. In a groundbreaking study in the 1980s, French scientist Alain Aspect and his colleagues experimentally caused two photons, or light particles, to become entangled. When a property of light – such as spin, position, or momentum – was measured in one of the particles, the “twin” particle instantly showed the opposite property. What was especially spooky was that distance between particles did not matter. Even though the twins were more than thirty miles apart, they behaved as if they were still connected. They were entangled. Radin is quick to point out that entanglement has been shown only at the subatomic level, and that we human beings are much bigger than that. But since people and things are composed of subatomic particles, Radin argues, entanglement may suggest that everything is interconnected, even people. We are not billiard balls on a pool table that occasionally bump into each other. We are part of a fabric woven so tightly that pulling one thread alters the whole tapestry. Or, try this: Reality is like Jell-O: Poke one side of the bowl and the green stuff on the other side jiggles. According to Dean Radin’s entangled reality, if that “poke” is an event – say, a car accident – information about that event could pop into someone’s head miles away. ( p. 250f) Hagerty tells of attending a conference at Cambridge University in 2005, one of ten seasoned journalists invited by The Templeton Foundation and Cambridge University to observe celebrities in the world of science present their ideas about biology, string theory, and multiverses. The question underlying the © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page20   presentations was: Could God retain a place in the intelligent man’s world? Or, in the scientific age: Has God been reduced to a superstitious belief lacking any rational basis? Hagerty felt after eight days of lectures that God was losing. She writes that she was witnessing a blitzkrieg of scientific materialism overrunning the quaint but untestable claims of God and that irked her. The decks were stacked, the outcome certain. How could it be any different – “The rules of the game – the paradigm of modern science – revolve around certain core beliefs. One of them dictates that scientists can study only what they can measure: The physical world and observable behavior. Try to investigate something that cannot be precisely measured – such as spiritual experience that transforms a person’s life – well, that’s cause for immediate disqualification.” (p. 269) She goes on: Another rule is the mind-brain paradigm: everything we are, see, feel, do, or think is a physical state, the electrical and chemical activity in three pounds of tissue called the brain. Mind, consciousness – forget about the soul – must be reduced to matter. It is a closed loop, excluding any notion of God or a spiritual realm. (p. 269) But then she tells of quite an amazing happening. But on that rainy morning in Cambridge I witnessed something extraordinary, akin to Dorothy spotting the little bald man pulling the levers of the Wizard of Oz. For only a moment, the curtain pulled back and we saw the fight for what it was: two belief systems duking it out. John Barrows, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, was speed-walking us through the hypothesis of a “fine-tuned” universe that is exquisitely and astonishingly calibrated to allow for life. He explained the concept of “multiverses,” which posits that we live in one of 10,500 universes. Then he said, almost as an aside, “I’m quite happy with a traditional theistic view of the universe.” He might as well have dropped an anvil on Richard Dawkin’s foot. Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist at Oxford University and possibly the world’s most famous atheist, certainly one of the most militant. Two days earlier, Dawkins had delivered a talk that he believed would prove the impossibility of God, and which would later be published as a book called The God Delusion. He had remained in Cambridge to hear the lectures of other researchers, particularly the world-class John Barrow. When Barrow, who turned out to be an Anglican, mentioned his belief in God, Dawkins began roiling with frustration like a teakettle about to blow. “Why on earth do you believe in God? Dawkins blurted. © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page21   All heads turned to Barrow. “If you want to look for divine action, physicists look at the rationality of the universe and the mathematical structure of the world.” “Yes, but why do you want to look for divine action?” Dawkins demanded. “For the same reason that someone might not want to,” Barrow responded with a little smile, as all of us erupted in laughter – except for Dawkins. So there you have it. The paradigm is not a law, it is a choice: a choice to look for – or exclude – the action of a divine intelligence. The paradigm to exclude a divine intelligence, or “Other,” or “God,” to reduce all things to matter, has reigned triumphant for some four hundred years, since the dawn of the Age of Reason. Today, a small yet growing number of scientists are trying to chip away at the paradigm, suspecting that its feet are made of clay. (pp. 269f) After all of her travels, interviews and investigation of mind-brain research, Hagerty came to a place where head and heart could comfortably dwell. This is her witness. I came to define God by His handiwork: a craftsman who builds the hope of eternity into our genes, a master electrician and chemist who outfits our brains to access another dimension, a guru who rewards our spiritual efforts by allowing us to feel united with all things, an intelligence that pervades every atom and every nanosecond, all time and space, in the throes of death or the ecstasy of life. This view of God and spiritual reality offers an alternative to superstition. It allows you to steer through an all-or-nothing attitude – that either there is a God who intervenes, depending on His mood and whether you’ve been naughty or nice; or that “God” is the product of ignorance and we live in a cold, uncaring, random universe. It seems to me that advances in science, and particularly in quantum physics, are offering another description of reality in which all things are guided by and connected to an Infinite Mind. This description, of course, echoes the words of mystics down the ages. (p. 277f) Finally, the originating question, “Is there more than this?” She answers, yes, there is and she believes the new science of spirituality buttresses her instinct that we are crafted with astonishing precision so that we can, on occasion, peer into a spiritual world and know God. This is a place the heart can rest and the mind can follow. And there is more to come! © Grand Valley State University �Religious Quest: Groping for God Richard A. Rhem Page22   References: Karen Armstrong. The Case for God. Thorndike Press, 2009. Barbara Haggerty. Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality. Riverhead, 2009. Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist. Ballantine Books, 2009. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Community Series The Religious Quest Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Karen Armstrong. The Case for God, 2009. Barbara Bradley Hagerty. Fingerprints of God, 2002, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist, 2009. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20100926 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-09-26 Title A name given to the resource Groping for the God in Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on September 26, 2010 entitled "Groping for the God in Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being", as part of the series "The Religious Quest", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Community, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives History of Religion https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/570f8e1648aa116e545b48d7bfcd1f71.pdf 5844704f0970902c9ab930211f87261b PDF Text Text Whose Truth Are You Living? By What Authority? Matthew 7: 18-29; Luke 19: 45-20:8 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mothers’ Trust Ganges, Michigan August 29, 2010 I invite you to think with me about a subject that has fascinated me, even tortured me for years, indeed from youth. I was an old young man. Warped from the womb. I had been dedicated to the service of God by my father while still safe in my mother’s womb. I learned that on the day of my ordination in a letter from my father. I was a serious and thoughtful youth. Nurtured in the faith, solidly traditional, I wondered about the Christian faith – I believed it with heart and soul, but early on I worried that maybe it might be swallowed up by unbelief. Would there be a church to serve when I came of age? I did not really savor my years of education – my studies were for the purpose of being a minister – I endured the seven years of college and seminary so that finally I could get on with ministry. I never experienced normal adolescent doubt, nor one day of rebellion against authority, parental or otherwise. I came out of college and seminary with the faith with which I entered intact. I was a very conservative Dutch Reformed Calvinist. My first congregation, First Reformed of Spring Lake, was a great call but I was a bit threatened because the tenor of the congregation was more liberal than I was. During the third year there, the Reformed Church, in collaboration with the Presbyterian Church, brought out a new church school curriculum for children through adults. It was called “The Covenant Life Curriculum”. I studied the Foundation papers and taught an introductory course to an adult group. It was a bit challenging. Both the foundation papers and the introductory course dealt with the view of Scripture that informed the curriculum. About that same time the Reformed Church, through, I believe, its theological commission, wrote a report on Biblical authority. I remember so well debating the report on the floor of the Muskegon Classis. I was wary of the report. The phrase that troubled me was that “Scripture was infallible in all that it intends to teach.” The qualification “intends to teach” was saying, for example, that Scripture did not intend to teach a scientific account of creation, something that seems so obvious to me now. However at the time I saw that phrase as giving wiggle room to those who want to evade Scriptural authority. In those dark ages of my development I wanted an “infallible and inerrant” Scripture. © Grand Valley State University   �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 2   In retrospect, I realize how large loomed the issue of authority for me – guaranteeing absolute truth. I wanted a thoroughly authoritative Word of God as the only guide for faith and practice. Again, in retrospect I realize that that need arose from a deep-seated insecurity within me. I was very defensive against any crack in the armor of biblical authority because the Bible was the Word of God on which I posited my whole ministry. From my present understanding, I can see that my faith, my message, what I felt charged to proclaim was not really an assured inward experience to share but a creedal, confessional system on which I had placed my whole life and ministry. I was dead serious about it. I believed with my whole being that at issue were heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. I shouldn’t be too hard on myself as though this were a system of belief external to my own spiritual life. I had from childhood through youth and into adulthood a meaningful piety. My experience was deep and personal but, I now realize, I relied on the external prop of a system of absolute truth rooted in an infallible and inerrant Holy Book and, interestingly, I was intelligent enough to know what I needed – a solid foundation on which to base my own spiritual life and my ministry– was not without some weak links in the system. About the same time I was debating Scriptural authority on the floor of classis and being introduced to a more progressive, or liberal view of Scripture (even though the Covenant Life Curriculum was still very mainstream conservative), I encountered a pastoral situation that shook me. Being a young pastor, I had much to do with our young people. I took them to a Bible Conference for Youth for Christ week. We bonded tightly. I loved those kids. One young lady attended Sunday School and youth groups whose parents did not attend the services and were not members of the congregation. She was one of a whole group who made her confession of faith. The next summer she went away with a friend to work in a motel with her friend’s mother. The mother was a Mormon. My dear young person came home, confused and eventually embraced the Mormon faith. I dealt with her as best I could. I gave her biblical texts. Her friend’s mother gave her texts from the Book of Mormon. I lost that struggle and was heart-broken. Strange as it may seem, that seemingly rather minor pastoral event was an epiphany for me. I, who had argued for an infallible, inerrant Word of God met my match when my dear young person met my book with her new-found book. I’m sure there were many dynamics that impinged on her decision but what I had to face up to squarely was that, if I only had a text, a rival text could neutralize it or overcome it. Put that pastoral crisis together with a fresh probing of biblical authority and I was on the way to a whole new understanding of authority in Christian experience. A long arduous journey lay ahead of me. After a year I left Spring Lake for a very conservative congregation in New Jersey where I introduced the Covenant of Life Curriculum, which met strong opposition from some of the leadership. After three years I realized I would have to dedicate years to bringing © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 3   that congregation around – and it could have been done – or leave to fulfill a desire I had when I graduated from seminary – to continue my studies in Europe. I decided to go on to post-graduate study and was most fortunate to be accepted at the University of Leiden and Professor Dr. Hendrikus Berkhof who became my mentor. How well I remember those years. Berkhof was a marvelous teacher. I would formulate my questions in preparation for meeting with him. I really wanted answers but he would respond to my questions with “Ja, Ja, that is the question.” I knew that was the question but I wanted the answer. Instead he left me twisting in the wind because he knew the critical issue was learning the questions, not finding the answers because in these matters of religious probing and spiritual inquiry there were no simple and easy answers. Here we are not dealing with the hard data of the natural sciences but with the probing of the spirit – or the Spirit. In this arena one must give up on easy answers, hard data, realizing one is on a journey, engaged in a quest which takes one beyond the limits of proof and verification. For four years I read and read and read, and I struggled to catch up on the education I had never received, in large part because I was not open to new insight and growth. But now I was. I was not at all certain I would have a message to preach when once this oasis of in-depth inquiry were concluded. But I had come finally to a place where I wanted to follow the inquiry with integrity wherever it led me. For me, for anyone, that is revolutionary – the threshold of open and honest inquiry. I was beginning to see how my narrow and constricted view of biblical authority kept me from an honest encounter with the larger questions of faith and life. I saw how concrete issues in the church could not be handled with the view of Scripture I had brought to my ministry. One such issue at the time was the ordination of women. I began to see how the culture of biblical times could not be simply transposed into the present and that the Scripture bore all the marks of its culture of origin. On one occasion I said to Professor Berkhof that I should write a dissertation on biblical authority in terms of my growing understanding in order to deal fruitfully with issues such as the ordination of women. He smiled and said, “Do you know what they will do to you?” He understood well how institutional religion works. And I was beginning to understand the tension between what one holds as authoritative, the source of authority – be it a sacred book or an institution, a religious community culture or tight tribal pattern, and what one senses is true and right and good in one’s own depths. All tribes, cultures, institutions evolve over time but most often at a snail’s pace and change that results is often the consequence of social upheaval that creates a crisis forcing new postures and positions on the relevant issues or views involved. And often there is some catalytic agent, some charismatic leader that creates the © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 4   focus and forces the change. For example, a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King. Or – Jesus! This process which happens in the broader culture in all areas of human endeavor – religion, politics, economics, social theory – and our personal response is the phenomenon on which I invite you to think with me. Thus my title: “Whose Truth are You Living? By What Authority?” and my expansion of that title: We are shaped and formed as individuals and communities, shaped and formed by parents, teachers, pastors, political leaders, cultural icons. Much of our lives we live on “borrowed truth”, “truth” declared by our “tribe,” perhaps a holy book, a religious tradition and its institutional form – maybe even by a claim of rational absolutes or the claim only reason can determine truth. That being the case, how does one come to one’s own truth? How does one emerge from one’s “dogmatic slumbers?” Have you? Or would you rather not?….There is more than enough to keep us wondering together for a hour. I had just written the chronicle of my own struggle to find my own truth, my own voice, when I received Thursday’s blog from Tomdispatch that comes several times a week. I don’t always read it but the one whose work was featured Thursday was Andrew Bacevich. I have read a couple of his books and find he speaks to me. Andrew Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A brief bio from Wikipedia records: Bacevich graduated from West Point in 1969 and served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, serving in Vietnam from the summer of 1970 to the summer of 1971. Later he held posts in Germany, including the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the United States, and the Persian Gulf up to his retirement from the service with the rank of Colonel in the early 1990’s. He holds a Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, and taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins University prior to joining the faculty at Boston University in 1998. On May 13, 2007, Bacevich’s son, 1 Lt Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was killed in action in Iraq by an improvised explosive device sough of Samarra in Salah ad DinGovernate. The younger Bacevich, 27, was a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. The Tomdispath blog was the introduction to Bacevich’s latest work, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (Metropolitan Books). As I read Andrew Bacevich’s account of his evolution, it was haunting; it was very similar to what I had just written about myself. He writes, “My own education did not commence until I had reached middle age.” It happened for him at the © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Brandenburg Gate in Berlin soon after the Wall had fallen. Without going into detail here, let me just cite his own description of what was going on within him. Huddling among the scarred columns, those peddlers – almost certainly off-duty Russian soldiers awaiting redeployment home – constituted a subversive presence. They were loose ends of a story that was supposed to have ended neatly when the Berlin Wall came down. As we hurried off to find warmth and a meal, this disconcerting encounter stuck with me, and I began to entertain this possibility: that the truths I had accumulated over the previous twenty years as a professional soldier – especially truths about the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy – might not be entirely true. By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high – whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops – is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor. I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naif. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education. Bacevich records a military visit to the university city of Jena in 1990. What he saw and experienced in his visits to Jena and Berlin “offered glimpses of a reality at odds with my most fundamental assumptions. Uninvited and unexpected, subversive forces had begun to infiltrate my consciousness. Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.” Retiring from the military, Bacevich re-evaluated the assumptions that had constituted his “truth.” Viewing the rise of the imperial drive of this nation in its policy decisions he was shocked and disillusioned by the course of our international relations over the past two decades. “What should stand in the place of such discarded convictions,” he asked, “…arriving at even an approximation of truth would entail subjecting conventional wisdom, both past and present, to sustained and searching scrutiny. Cautiously at first but with growing confidence, this I vowed to do.” He writes, © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 6   …Doing so meant shedding habits of conformity acquired over decades. All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. Here then were the preliminary steps essential to making education accessible. Over a period of years, a considerable store of debris had piled up. Now, it all had to go. Belatedly, I learned that more often than not what passes for conventional wisdom is simply wrong. Adopting fashionable attitudes to demonstrate one’s trustworthiness – the world of politics is flush with such people hoping thereby to qualify for inclusion in some inner circle – is akin to engaging in prostitution in exchange for promissory notes. It’s not only demeaning but downright foolhardy. My intention in bringing in Andrew Bacevich is not to deal with the content of his transformation; that is incidental to my purpose. I cite him simply as an illustration of one who experienced a shaking revolution in his worldview. He had been living by a truth that he could no longer affirm and that is a shattering experience. As he records that experience I get goose bumps because I’ve been there. I well remember times while studying in Europe that I wondered if I would ever again have a gospel to preach – or, for that matter, whether I would have anything to preach. I wondered if I might not have to sneak off into academia hoping to find a respectable teaching position. To have a deep formation of mind and heart called into question and then to press on facing the possibility that one’s whole life project was in jeopardy – that, simply stated, one might have committed one’s life to what one could no longer affirm is a scary business. It takes courage to face up to that possibility. Sometimes one comes to a point of crisis and has no other option. Sometimes it may be simply a gnawing in the soul, wondering about the mystery of human being, a hunger and thirst for finding one’s own voice, tired of living on borrowed truth, needing to be living out one’s deepest intuitions and reasons of the heart. One of the finest accounts of that personal quest is Herman Hesse’s Nobel prize winning novel, Siddhartha. In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family, of India’s highest caste – Brahmins – to pursue a contemplative life. After some years with a group of ascetics he leaves that path and enters a life of the flesh, fathering a son with a beautiful courtesan. But then growing restless again, bored and sickened by lust and greed, he moves on. Near despair, he comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. The sound signals the true beginning of his life – the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace and, finally, wisdom. It is a wonderful novel – a shimmering, iridescent tale of spiritual quest. Siddhartha had been introduced to the finest wisdom and knowledge of his Brahmin heritage, © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 7   But where were the Brahmins, the priests, the wise men, who were successful not only in having this most profound knowledge, but in experiencing it? He respected his father; he was worthy of admiration; his manner was quiet and noble. He lived a good life and was wise but Siddhartha wondered – did he live in bliss? Was he at peace? The young man concluded one must find the source within one’s own self, one must possess it. In his wanderings Siddhartha meets Gotama, the Buddha. He recognizes the wisdom of the Buddha’s enlightenment. He is everything that has been claimed for him. But after hearing his teachings he makes bold to speak with the great man and he is graciously received. Graciously and sincerely he acknowledges Gotama’s clear and cogent teachings; yet he raises the key issue for him. “Do not be angry with me, O Illustrious One,” said the young man. “I have not spoken to you thus to quarrel with you about words. You are right when you say that opinions mean little, but may I say one thing more. I did not doubt you for one moment. Not for one moment did I doubt that you were the Buddha, that you have reached the highest goal which so many thousands of Brahmins and Brahmins’ sons are striving to reach. You have done so by your own seeking, in your own way, through thought, through mediation, through knowledge, through enlightenment. You have learned nothing through teachings., and so I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One, can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in the hour of your enlightenment. The teachings of the enlightened Buddha embrace much, they teach much – how to live righteously, how to avoid evil. But there is one thing that this clear, worthy instruction does not contain; it does not contain the secret of what the Illustrious One himself experienced… There you have it. Knowledge can be taught, instruction given, but the one thing Siddhartha sought cannot be taught – “the secret of what the Illustrious One himself experienced.” Inward illumination or the experience of enlightenment cannot be passed on. One can learn from stores of knowledge and expose oneself to the wisdom of the ages but to experience the inward illumination cannot be gotten from another – from a wise teacher or religious institution. Epiphanies happen. If we are fortunate they happen to us. They happen not in a vacuum. They do not happen in haphazard fashion to just anyone. They are the reward of those who hunger and thirst for wisdom and understanding so that one lives out of one’s own vision of the truth. And they happen most often to those in whom the spiritual thirst has been quickened in a community shaped by a vision of the truth. Further, inward illumination comes most often to one who has plumbed deeply one of the great traditions or spiritual paths. To win through to a place to stand that elicits one’s true and authentic voice is demanding. But the © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 8   reward is worth the struggle. To live from one’s true self is life’s highest achievement. The philosopher George Santayana wrote this marvelous statement: “Ultimate insights (now, that’s what we are talking about) have a tendency to undermine the orthodox approaches by which they have been reached.” Ultimate insights, or the moment of enlightenment – I think that is what Santayana is referring to. The dogmatic structures can bring one to the threshold of that moment – apart from some such structure one would not arrive there. He goes on to say the enlightened one must not then undo that structure lest one thereby deprive another from the sturdy dogmatic shoulders that have supported one in the quest for “ultimate insights” by which one transcends the dogmatic structure. It is valuable if not yet “ultimate.” Hesse’s Siddhartha may suggest the spiritual quest is a lonely way which one engages in all alone but I think that misses the author’s point. It is a story of an individual in his search encountering a variety of experiences but the central claim is that no one, no external authority, be it person or book or institution, can effect the transformation where one exclaims, ”Oh, I see!” That must happen from the inside out. But, again, if that is a solitary experience, its “moment” is prepared in the soil of tradition, of community, of family involving spiritual practice, be it meditation, corporate worship involving liturgy, ritual, sacrament, proclamation based on the founding story. That moment is variously named. Jesus spoke of being “born from above” or “born anew,” popularly spoken of as being “born again,” in his conversation with Nicodemus – a teacher of Israel, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus “by night” not wanting to advertise the fact that he was giving credibility to Jesus. Why did he come? Perhaps because, as Siddhartha expressed to the Buddha, one can be full of true and wise teachings and still be without inward illumination – that is, the experience of enlightenment when one truly “sees” with the soul. In the early years of my ministry I remember the tension – regeneration – being born again was the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian scheme of things. I could catechize, teach and preach but I could not effect that new birth. And for those who claimed that experience, it was more likely to be an assent to a body of belief which assent resulted in the person being considered a Christian. Some of the more dramatic conversions might be referred to as “born again experiences” but that was not the rule. There are branches of Christianity and in other religious traditions as well, where the emotions are targeted in an effort to bring the people to a charismatic experience or ecstasy. There are reports of such experiences as being life © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page 9   changing but the more common experience is a temporary emotional high and in some groups or communities the corporate gathering is the time for an emotional “fix.” But Jesus was not speaking of the emotions but rather an inward transformation, a spiritual birth effected by the Spirit of God. For some there is an identifiable date and place where the “lights” went on. I suspect for most who live from their own interior – their own compass of soul and intuitive vision, the transformation is gradual, one perhaps coming to realize one day that one’s whole being has been transformed. St. Paul was an example of crisis, of an unforgettable moment of encounter. For him a vision, a voice, and a 180 degree turn. But the moment of crisis did not stand alone. The very frenzy with which he was opposing the Jewish Jesus movement, the movement called “The People of the Way” was evidence that he was fighting something he sensed might be genuine, real, true. “The Hound of Heaven” had been pursuing him. The autobiographical note in his letter to the Philippians describes his life-transforming experience. He warns against those he considers false teachers and then very interestingly claims his detractors can’t stand in his shadow at their own game. Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh – even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh. If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. That was the pre-Damascus-Road Paul and obviously he had been serious – a real religious “blue blood” as it were. And from other writings we know he valued all of that highly. But he had seen something else. Paul’s “conversion” was not to another religion. He was born and he died a Jew as Jesus was born and died a Jew. But that moment of illumination changed everything, as he writes. Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page10   like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Paul, more than Jesus, gave shape to the Jewish Jesus movement that embraced non-Jews and eventually became the Christian Church. He was as passionate to proclaim his new insight as he had been to stamp out “The Way,” pre-Damascus Road. And there is no question that he was effective and his ministry bore great fruit. It is my sense, however, that he was not as effective as Jesus in reaching the heart of those who were addressed. In the Gospels we read that Jesus held the crowds with his teaching and story telling. At the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew writes, Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes. (Matthew 7: 28-29) And as his ministry came to a climax in Jerusalem following the Palm Sunday event, Luke records: Then he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling things there; and he said, “It is written, ‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.” Every day he was teaching in the temple. The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people kept looking for a way to kill him; but they did not find anything they could do, for all the people were spellbound by what they heard. One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders and said to him, “Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority? He answered them, “I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?” They discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say,' From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know where it came from. Then Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem Page11   I find the juxtaposition of the citations from Matthew and Luke fascinating. The authenticity of Jesus as one speaking his own deepest truth caused the people to hear him as one having authority. Yet, of course, authority that emanated from within him for he had no power. The Temple “authorities,” scribes and elders, on the other hand had power but lacked the authority that stems from inner being. So the powerless Jesus is heard as one speaking with authority; the authorities in power are powerless with the people. What Luke records of the Temple authorities asking Jesus by what authority he carried out the prophetic protest in the Temple presents us with a typical case of those in power threatened by one who clearly has that inward strength and sense of presence that draws others to himself and is able to enlist others in a movement for change. We see it again and again in religion, in politics and government. Once in power the prime consideration too often becomes how to protect and preserve and perpetuate the position of power. And that’s the difference. A Jesus of historical record, a fictional Siddhartha are not about power. They are about effecting change in themselves and in community from egoistic ambition to compassion, to empathy, to union. That is the wonder of such transformation. One lives with a heart that embraces, marked by love. Not that one is without principle, without passion for justice, for human wellbeing. But one is wary of ideological positions that divide and blind one to a larger vision. One is able to listen, to seek deeper understanding, to empathize with the other. And one becomes sensitive to one’s own limits, biases, fears and blind spots. For much of my own journey, the early years of ministry, being born by the Spirit from above was in order to be saved. Salvation was narrowly conceived – salvation from self, sin and guilt. Salvation to find its reward in another realm in a future world. Too late, but thankfully at last, I yield to Siddhartha’s truth – the experience of enlightenment is the experience of salvation in which I find my truth, my voice. My authority is within and here and now I am at home, at peace, mantled by Grace, trusting the deep intuitions of my heart – the gift of being born from above. And so, in conclusion, whose truth are you living? By what authority? I wish I could effect in you the experience which, transcending all knowledge and teaching, would enable you to say, “Oh! I see!” and then to rest, to trust the intuitions of your heart – in a word – to be born from above. That I cannot do; no one can. Thank God I suspect most of you know the experience. And if you find yourself still wandering and wondering, hear this word from the great Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, who speaks in God’s place _ When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29: 13) © Grand Valley State University �Whose Truth Are You Living? Richard A. Rhem References: Andrew Bacevich. Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. Metropolitan Books, 2010. Herman Hesse. Siddhartha. Bantam Classics, 1981. © Grand Valley State University Page12   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Community Scripture Text Matthew 7:18-29, Luke 19:45-20:8 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Andrew Bacevich. Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. Metropolitan Books, 2010. Herman Hesse.Siddhartha. Bantam Classics, 1981. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20100829 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-08-29 Title A name given to the resource Whose Truth Are You Living? By What Authority? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 29, 2010 entitled "Whose Truth Are You Living? By What Authority?", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Community, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Matthew 7:18-29, Luke 19:45-20:8. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Spiritual Transformation https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/8d74e6caeacfe75432386231f15d2ab9.pdf f8ad22f29d8c7b39f83e73a292868105 PDF Text Text Do We Need a New American Dream? Matthew 5: 38-48; Romans 12: 1-2; 14-21 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan July 14, 2010 Prepared text of the sermon A week ago we celebrated once again the independence of this nation, a nation that was founded on a magnificent vision of human rights, of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Those who created and signed our founding documents were a rare gathering of visionaries whose labors established the foundation of a very great nation. As one of my friends said recently, those leaders were a miracle; they would never be able to establish the Constitution or the Bill of Rights today in the present feverish climate of political partisanship. One of my most respected mentors whose funeral I conducted lived to the age of 92. He would often say how blessed one is to live long because one gains a perspective on the ebb and flow of human events. One has seen it all before, as it were, and is not quick to despair no matter how dark the day. And that is certainly true. Nevertheless, one has to be wholly out of touch with the current affairs of state not to wonder if we haven’t reached a very dark period of our national life. The partisanship in our federal government obstructing the legislative process, the degree to which financial power trumps dealing with critical global issues, the serious economic situation of the present, dealing with the worst ecological disaster ever – one could go on but, of whatever political stripe, I think there is a general consensus that we are not in a good place. It is in recognition of the present state of this great nation and its failure to live by its founding vision that I raise the question, “Do We Need a New American Dream?” The New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, opened his column on July 2 writing: When I was young and naïve, I believed that important people took positions based on careful considerations of the options. Now I know better. Much of what serious people believe rests on prejudices, not analysis. And these prejudices are subject to fads and fashions. Krugman, a Nobel Prize economics scholar from Princeton, has been warning that the stimulus has been too little and now warns against cutting off stimulus © Grand Valley State University   �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 2   spending too soon. He finds the claims of deficit hawks similar to the claims of Herbert Hoover as we plunged into the Great Depression. Well, I’m not here to argue for or against Krugman; this session is not economics 101. His statement about how we take positions based on prejudice rather than analysis struck me because I have been wrestling with that very same realization. When one wants to raise questions about the American Dream, one is not likely to have before one open minds eager for critical analysis. I’m not certain if religious views or nationalism and patriotism breed the greater emotional bonds that result in more prejudicial positions and less critical awareness; maybe they are equal. This I know, a preacher courts disaster addressing any one of them. That’s why I’m glad I’m not a preacher any longer – just a senior on the edge of senility who will be forgiven for rushing in where angels fear to tread. With all of that being recognized, nonetheless, I raise the question, “Do we need a new American Dream?” The question was raised by the best selling author Jeremy Rifkin, one of the leading social thinkers of our time, whose many titles cover a wide range of subjects, and whose counsel is sought by the European Union and heads of state around the world. His recent book, The Empathic Civilization – The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, is not focused on the United States particularly; rather, he is thinking in global terms about the human race. He did, however, write an essay entitled, “Empathic Civilization: Is it Time to Replace the American Dream?” It is in that essay that he deals specifically with the theme of my presentation. He defines the American Dream: For two hundred years the American Dream has served as the bedrock foundation of the American way of life. The dream, reduced to its essence, is that in America, every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interest in the marketplace, and make something of their life, or at least sacrifice so the next generation might enjoy a better life. The role of the government, in turn, is to guarantee individual freedom, assure the proper functioning of the market, protect property rights, and look out for national security. In all other matters, the government is expected to step aside so that a nation of free men and women can pursue their individual ambitions. He goes on to write of the present state of that dream which he thinks is in crisis and then suggests that to recognize that fact is one thing; to do an analysis of the Dream’s underlying assumptions is another. Rifkin writes, Although American history is peppered with lamentations about the souring of the dream, the criticism never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 3   thwart its realization. To suggest that the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche, would be considered almost treasonous. Yet, I would like to suggest just that. I opened with Paul Krugman’s statement that “much of what serious people believe rests on prejudice, not analysis,” because the task Rifkin takes on – examining the underlying assumptions of the Dream – is where analysis will run into prejudice. Nevertheless, his examination is critical for an understanding of our present national situation. His particular attention to the American Dream arises from his large work, The Empathic Civilization, which gives an overview of the human story in its evolution and holds hope and possibility for a new stage of the human project. Rifkin portrays the broad sweep of human history as far back as we can probe, but, for our purposes, Rifkin notes the cultural divide between faith versus reason, faith dominating the first millenium and a half of the Common Era, with reason becoming dominant with the Age of Enlightenment. It is his contention that we are moving beyond the faith-reason divide toward an empathic civilization. In a blog entitled “Empathic Civilization: Why Have We Become So Uncivil?” (posted 03/01/2010), Rifkin writes, At the dawn of the modern market economy and nation-state era, the philosophers of the Enlightenment challenged the Age of Faith, that governed over the feudal economy, with the Age of Reason. Theologians and philosophers have continued to battle over faith vs. reason ever since, their debates often spilling over into the cultural and political arenas, with profound consequences for society. The empathic advocates argue that, for the most part, both earlier narratives about human nature fail to plumb the depths of what makes us human and therefore leave us with cosmologies that are incomplete stories – that is, they fail to touch the deepest realities of existence. That’s not to dismiss the critical elements that make the stories of faith and reason so compelling. It’s only that something essential is missing – and that something is “embodied experience.” Both the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – as well as the Eastern religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, either disparage bodily existence or deny its importance. So too does modern science and most of the rational philosophers of the Enlightenment. For the former, especially the Abrahamic faiths, the body is fallen and a source of evil. Its presence is a constant reminder of the depravity and mortality of human nature. For the latter, the body is mere scaffolding to maintain the mind, a necessary inconvenience to provide sensory perception, nutrients, and mobility. It is a machine the mind uses to impress its will on the world. It is even loathed because of its transient nature. The body is a © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 4   constant reminder of death, and therefore, feared, disparaged and dismissed in the world’s great religions and among many of the Enlightenment philosophers. But, Rifkin argues, the worldviews of both faith and reason, while still very much alive in the present, are giving way to what he calls the age of empathy. He points to recent developments: New developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and psychology are laying the groundwork for a wholesale reappraisal of human consciousness. The premodern notion that faith and God’s grace are the windows to reality and the Enlightenment idea that reason is at the apex of modern consciousness are giving way to a more sophisticated approach to a theory of mind. Researchers in a diverse range of fields and disciplines are beginning to reprioritize some of the critical features of faith and reason within the context of a broader empathic consciousness. They argue that all of human activity is embodied experience – that is, participation with the other – and that the ability to read and respond to another person “as if” he or she were oneself is the key to how human beings engage the world, create individual identity, develop language, learn to reason, become social, establish cultural narratives, and define reality and existence. Rifkin is making a bold and daring claim that human nature at its core is empathic – in contrast to widely accepted views – from both the religious and the Enlightenment thinkers, that human nature is “fallen,” is depraved in religious parlance and competitive, even predatory, self-serving, acquisitive – every man for himself and winner take all in the view of a market economy stemming from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith and others. Just what does he mean when he claims the deepest core of human nature is to be empathetic? Let me expand a bit on the nature of empathy as he explains it and then illustrate it with stories that reveal it. As I indicated above, the recognition of an empathic core to the human being is a relatively recent discovery with much work remaining to demonstrate and document it. Why has the realization of human empathy taken so long to understand? According to Rifkin, There is still another reason why empathy has yet to be seriously examined in all of its anthropological and historical detail. The difficulty lies in the evolutionary process itself. Empathic consciousness has grown slowly over the 175,000 years of human history. It has sometimes flourished, only to recede for long periods of time. Its progress has been irregular, but its trajectory is clear. Empathic development and the development of selfhood go hand in hand and accompany the increasingly complex © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 5   energy-consuming social structures that make up the human journey. (We will examine this relationship throughout the book.) Because the development of selfhood is so completely intertwined with the development of empathic consciousness, the very term “empathy” didn’t become part of the human vocabulary until 1909 – about the same time that modern psychology began to explore the internal dynamics of the unconscious and consciousness itself. In other words, it wasn’t until human beings were developed enough in human selfhood that they could begin thinking about the nature of their innermost feelings and thoughts in relation to other people’s innermost feelings and thoughts that they were able to recognize the existence of empathy, find the appropriate metaphors to discuss it, and probe the deep recesses of its multiple meanings. We have to remember that as recently as six generations ago, our greatgreat-grandparents – living circa mid-to-late 1880’s – were not encultured to think therapeutically. My own grandparents were unable to probe their feelings and thinking in order to analyze how their past emotional experiences and relationships affected their behavior toward others and their sense of self. They were untutored in the coming of the age of psychology. Young people are thoroughly immersed in therapeutic consciousness and comfortable with thinking about, getting in touch with and analyzing their own innermost feelings, emotions, and thoughts – as well as those of their fellows. The precursor to empathy was the word “sympathy” – a term that came into vogue during the European Enlightenment. The Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote a book on moral sentiments in 1759. Although far better known for his theory of the marketplace, Smith devoted considerable attention to the question of human emotions. Sympathy, for Smith, Hume, other philosophers, and literary figures of the time, meant feeling sorry for another’s plight. Empathy shares emotional territory with sympathy but is markedly different. (The Empathetic Civilization, p. 11f) Rifkin connects empathy to its origins in sympathy and makes the distinction. The term “empathy” is derived from the German word Einfuhlung, coined by Robert Vischer in 1872 and used in German aesthetics. Einfuhlung relates to how observers project their own sensibilities onto an object of adoration or contemplation and is a way of explaining how one comes to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of, for example, a work of art. The German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey borrowed the term from aesthetics and began to use it to describe the mental process by which one person enters into another’s being and comes to know how they feel and think. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 6   In 1909, the American psychologist E.B. Titchener translated Einfuhlung into a new word, “empathy.” Titchener had studied with Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern psychology, while in Europe. Like many young psychologists in the field, Titchener was primarily interested in the key concept of introspection, the process by which a person examines his or her own inner feelings and drives, emotions, and thoughts to gain a sense of personal understanding about the formation of his or her identity and selfhood. The “pathy” in empathy suggests that we enter into the emotional state of another’s suffering and feel his or her pain as if it were our own. Variations of empathy soon emerged, including “empathic” and “to empathize,” as the term became part of the popular psychological culture emerging in cosmopolitan centers in Vienna, London, New York, and elsewhere. Unlike sympathy, which is more passive, empathy conjures up active engagement – the willingness of an observer to become –part of another’s experience, to share the feeling of that experience… (p. 12) Is that the core of the human being in your experience? Why, if it is so, has human history seemed to describe quite another human being? Rifkin acknowledges that the official chroniclers of the human story – the historians – “have given short shrift to empathy as a driving force in the unfolding of human history. They write about social conflicts and wars, heroes and evil wrongdoers, technological progress and the exercise of power.” Only rarely is the other side of the human experience covered – the side that speaks of our deeply social nature and the evolution and extension of human affection. Rifkin contends, History, on the other hand, is more often than not made by the disgruntled and discontented, the angry and rebellious – those interested in exercising authority and exploiting others and their victims, interested in righting wrongs and restoring justice. By this reckoning, much of the history that is written is about the pathology of power. Perhaps that is why, when we come to think about human nature, we have such a bleak analysis. Out collective memory is measured in terms of crises and calamities, harrowing injustices, and terrifying episodes of brutality inflicted on each other and our fellow creatures. But if these were the defining elements of human experience, we would have perished as a species long ago. All of which raises the question “Why have we come to think of life in such dire terms?” The answer is that tales of misdeeds and woe surprise us. They are unexpected and, therefore, trigger alarm and heighten our interest. That is because such events are novel and not the norm, but they are newsworthy and for that reason they are the stuff of history. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 7   The everyday world is quite different. Although life as it’s lived on the ground, close to home, is peppered with suffering, stresses, injustices, and foul play, it is, for the most part, lived out in hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity. Comfort and compassion between people creates goodwill, establishes the bonds of sociality, and gives joy to people’s lives. Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is our core nature. Empathy is the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization. In short, it is the extraordinary evolution of empathic consciousness that is the quintessential underlying story of human history, even if it has not been given the serious attention it deserves by our historians. (The Empathic Civilization, p. 10) I was given The Empathic Civilization for my birthday in February and I was reading it during the Winter Olympics. I was reading about empathy at the deepest core of our being when I actually experienced an instance of the human family being one. Did you watch the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver? If you did is there one moment in particular that stands out for you? For me it was the moment when Joannie Brochere, the Canadian figure skater, finished her first program – a brilliant performance and, at its completion, burst into tears. Her parents had come to Vancouver to support her bid for an Olympic medal. A day after arriving her mother died of a heart attack. It was decided Joannie would skate nevertheless. She did. She did it beautifully – for her mother – and then burst into tears. I think there was not a dry eye in the Olympic stadium nor anywhere in the world where people were watching. The TV commentator Scott Hamilton’s voice cracked with emotion. In those moments the world was one, united in empathetic embrace of that young woman. I was a beautiful moment. I knew immediately that Rifkin’s claim for empathy at our core was right. Rifkin knows that claim will not prove convincing through all sorts of scientific studies of the brain – not through any form of rational argument where various voices debate the issue. Thus before making his case for human nature being empathic he relates an historical incident that has the same effect on us as did the Joannie Brochere moment. He opens chapter one relating the story of December 24, 1914, in Flanders, Belgium: The evening of December 24, 1914, Flanders. The first world war in history was entering into its fifth month. Millions of soldiers were bedded down in makeshift trenches latticed across the European countryside. In many places the opposing armies were dug in within thirty to fifty yards of each other and within shouting distance. The conditions were hellish. The bitter-cold winter air chilled to the bone. The trenches were waterlogged. Soldiers shared their quarters with rats and vermin. Lacking adequate latrines, the stench of human excrement was everywhere. The men slept upright to avoid the much and sludge of their makeshift arrangements. Dead soldiers littered the no-man’s-land between opposing forces, the © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 8   bodies left to rot and decompose within yards of their still-living comrades who were unable to collect them for burial. As dusk fell over the battlefields, something extraordinary happened. The Germans began lighting candles on the thousands of small Christmas trees that had been sent to the front to lend some comfort to the men. The German soldiers then began to sing Christmas carols – first “Silent Night,” then a stream of other songs followed. The English soldiers were stunned. One soldier, gazing in disbelief at the enemy lines, said the blazed trenches looked “like the footlights of a theater.” The English soldiers responded with applause, at first tentatively, then with exuberance. They began to sing Christmas carols back to their German foes to equally robust applause. A few men from both sides crawled out of their trenches and began to walk across the no-man’s-land toward each other. Soon hundreds followed. As word spread across the front, thousands of men poured out of their trenches. They shook hands, exchanged cigarettes and cakes and showed photos of their families. They talked about where they hailed from, reminisced about Christmases past, and joked about the absurdity of war. The next morning, as the Christmas sun rose over the battlefield of Europe, tens of thousands of men – some estimates put the number as high as 100,000 soldiers – talked quietly with one another. Enemies just twenty-four hours earlier, they found themselves helping each other bury their dead comrades. More than a few pickup soccer matches were reported. Even officers at the front participated, although when the news filtered back to the high command in the rear, the generals took a less enthusiastic view of the affair. Worried that the truce might undermine military morale, the generals quickly took measures to rein in their troops. The surreal “Christmas truce” ended as abruptly as it began – all in all, a small blip in a war that would end in November 1918 with 8.5 million military deaths in the greatest episode of human carnage in the annals of history until that time. For a few short hours, no more than a day, tens of thousands of human beings broke ranks, not only from their commands but from their allegiances to country, to show their common humanity. Thrown together to maim and kill, they courageously stepped outside of their institutional duties to commiserate with one another and to celebrate one another’s lives. While the battlefield is supposed to be a place where heroism is measured in one’s willingness to kill and die for a noble cause that transcends one’s everyday life, these men chose a different type of courage. They reached out to each other’s very private suffering and sought solace in each other’s plight. Walking across no-man’s-land, they found themselves in one © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page 9   another. The strength to comfort each other flowed from a deep unspoken sense of their individual vulnerability and their unrequited desire for the companionship of their fellows. It was, without reserve, a very human moment. Still, it was reported as a strange lapse at the time. A century later, we commemorate the episode as a nostalgic interlude in a world we have come to define in very different terms. (p. 6f) I get goose bumps reading that story even though I’ve read it many times. Something happens to me inside – some “Yes, yes, that is the way it should be – always, among all people.” I know in my “heart,” my inner being, what rationally I cannot prove. I’m reminded of a statement of Rudolph Otto in his classic, The Holy: “The feeling which remains when the concept fails.” Whether or not one can argue the biological, psychological, or spiritual bases of empathy at the core of our being, one knows that it is true in one’s heart of hearts. As Rifkin comments on that Christmas Eve, he denies it was some sort of fluke: But was it a lapse or was it an epiphany moment when what is deepest in our human nature came to expression in a most remarkable fashion? Yet what transpired in the battlefields of Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 between tens of thousands of young men had nothing to do with original sin or productive labor. And the pleasure those men sought in each other’s company bore little resemblance to the superficial rendering of pleasure offered up by nineteenth-century utilitarians and even less to Freud’s rather pathological account of a human race preoccupied by the erotic impulse. The men at Flanders expressed a far deeper human sensibility – one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence and that transcends the portals of time and the exigencies of whatever contemporary orthodoxy happens to rule. We need only ask ourselves why we feel so heartened at what these men did. They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another. (p. 8) I tell the story of Joannie Brochere and relate the Christmas Eve “epiphany moment” because we can “feel” what occurred in both instances, whereas simply to cite the claim with supporting scientific analysis of child development, psychological and cognitive data invites arguments, and it is so easy to move into an intellectual discussion when we are dealing with the deepest level of feeling which defies rational statement because it is the language of the heart. I began with Rifkin’s question, “Do we need a new American Dream?” He raises the question out of his sense of our present national condition and his convection that humans are empathetic at their core. As we’ve noted, he sees the American © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page10   Dream rooted in Enlightenment thought of the modern period that replaced the theological view that prevailed for the first 1600 years of the Common Era. The Enlightenment philosophers saw human reason as the apex of being human and that is what Rifkin challenges with his claim that empathy marks us rather than the ideology of faith from the feudal period or reason from the Enlightenment Age. In a word, the present is increasingly a world of growing global consciousness and we have a dream born of eighteenth-century thinking when the Age of Reason and the amazing vision of our founding fathers set us on the course to greatness. Rifkin suggests the vitriolic rhetoric, the nasty partisanship, the “take the government back” and “get government out of the way” represent a sense of panic that we are losing the American Dream and the reaction is precisely a lack of empathy which, like it or not, will increasingly mark our global civilization. That is where we have arrived and are increasingly moving: the global civilization, the empathic civilization, are understood as threatening the American Dream – and they are. In a blog posted 02/08/2010 Rifkin asks “Empathic Civilization: Why Have We Become So Uncivil?” He suggests, When we talk about civility, we are really talking about empathy: the willingness to listen to another’s point of view, to put one’s self in another’s shoes and to emotionally and cognitively experience what they are feeling and thinking. To civilize is to empathize. Below all of the fiery rhetoric and finger pointing, the acid comments and degrading personal attacks, is a deep-seated fear and mistrust of “the other” – in other words, a lack of empathy. My sense is that the fear that is spreading like a wild fire across America is due, in large part, to a seismic shift occurring in our thinking about the most cherished values of American life: our notions of freedom, equality, and democracy. In other words, what we are really discussing – underneath the surface of the political and ideological debates – are our beliefs about the basic drives and aspirations of human beings. Freedom in the nation state era has been closely associated with the ability to control one’s labor and secure one’s property, because that is the way to optimize pleasure and be happy. The classical economists argued that every individual is free to the extent he or she can pursue their individual self-interest in the material world. Freedom, in the rational mode, is the freedom to be autonomous and independent and to be an island to one’s self. To be free is to be rational, detached, acquisitive, and utilitarian. The role of government, in turn, is to safeguard private property relations and allow market forces to operate, unfettered by political constraints. The conventional American dream is personal opportunity to succeed in the marketplace. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page11   Against that “conventional American Dream,” Rifkin sets out our new global situation: The empathic approach to freedom in the emerging Biosphere Age is based on a different premise. Freedom means being able to optimize the full potential of one’s life, and the fulfilled life is one of companionship, affection, and belonging, made possible by ever deeper and more meaningful personal experiences and relationships with others – across neighborhoods, continents and the world. One is free, then, to the extent that one has been nurtured and raised in a global society that allows for empathetic opportunities at every level of human discourse. The new dream is the quality of life of humanity. Rifkin makes a strong case for the incivility of the present being the result of “what we are really discussing underneath the surface of the political and ideological debates,” – that is our beliefs about the basic drives and aspirations of human beings.” What we fail to do is carry on civil discourse. As I cited earlier in this essay, Rifkin contends that our criticism “never extends to the assumptions that underlie the dream, but only to political, economic and social forces that thwart its realization”. He knows well that what is needed is to recognize that “the dream itself is misguided, outdated, and even damaging to the American psyche and, as he writes, that “would be considered almost treasonous.” However, before we call for his head, we need to hear him further; empathy need not threaten our human existence at its best and highest. Rifkin writes, The ability to recognize oneself in the other and the other in oneself is a deeply democratizing experience. Empathy is the soul of democracy. It is an acknowledgment that each life is unique, unalienable, and deserving of equal consideration in the public square. The evolution of empathy and the evolution of democracy have gone hand in hand throughout history. The more empathic the culture, the more democratic its values and governing institutions. While apparent, it’s strange how little attention has been paid to the inextricable relationship between empathic extension and democratic expansion in the study of history and evolution of governance. Reimagining freedom, equality, and democracy from an empathic perspective has far-ranging consequences for the kind of society that we choose to live in. We would need to rethink our parenting styles, educational systems, business practices and even governance itself to reflect our empathic nature. This would constitute nothing less than a cultural revolution. No one would deny that there is merit to our long-standing ideas about freedom, equality and democracy – especially the notions of personal responsibility, self-sufficiency, and the protection of basic economic and © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page12   political rights. Still, it’s hard to deny the fact that a younger generation is beginning to broaden and deepen its sense of freedom, equality and democracy in an increasingly interconnected, interdependent and collaborative world. Perhaps what is needed is a more transparent public debate around our core views of freedom, equality and democracy. Maybe it is time to suggest a moratorium on the hyperbolic political rhetoric and incivility and begin a civil conversation around our differing views on human nature. This would offer us a moment in time to listen to each other, share our feelings, thoughts, concerns and aspirations, with the goal of trying to better understand each other’s perspectives, and hopefully find some emotional and cognitive common ground. Had I another life, that is the conversation in which I would love to be engaged. I would love to set forth the claims made by Rifkin in the preceding paragraphs and engage in a transparent public debate around our core views on freedom, equality and democracy. These are his claims: • The evolution of empathy and the evolution of democracy have gone hand in hand throughout history; • The more empathic the culture, the more democratic its values and governing institutions. Thus, the inextricable relationship between empathic extension and democratic expansion. Our problem today is not that there is a lack of conversation although perhaps conversation is too positive a term for the constant diet, 24/7, of political posturing and media anchor types’ inflamed rhetoric and betrayal of the truth. Our problem today is the lack of civil discourse, where we genuinely listen to each other, genuinely seek to hear each other and understand each other. That requires empathy. Antonio Damasio, a noted neuroscientist, has demonstrated through extensive studies of brain functioning that there is no such thing as a “cool headed reasoner.” (Descartes’ Error, 1994, cited by R. I. Benjamine in an essay on mediation). That means even as I recognize the critical necessity of civil discourse I must be aware that the human problem resides in me as well. I can become aware. I can “catch” myself. I can keep checking myself. That I must do. Further, I can be vigilant over against those who try to influence me. For example, the cable opinion shows or Talk Radio – let me mention three: Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Keith Obermann. There are many others but in the case of these three I have to ask, are they appealing to my better angels or to my demons? Are they stoking my fears, my prejudices, my darker emotions or aiding me in being civil, open and fair? Living with such awareness is the best way to be © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page13   a critical listener and not just one of the sheep being led to aberration, hate and even violence. Let me cite one example. A writer I have come to appreciate is Robert Wright who writes an occasional column in the New York Times on culture, politics and world affairs. On June 29, 2010 he wrote, “The Myth of Modern Jihad.” It concerned the response of Daniel Pipes to the Times Square bomber’s confession in which Shahzad said, “I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over. I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.” Pipes, I’ve discovered, is located on the right end of the political spectrum, known for his anti-Islamic position. (His father before him was an anti-Russian crusader.) Daniel Pipes is a Harvard Ph.D. and has lectured there and is presently at Stanford. His pedigree thus indicates scholarly achievement. His response to the Times Square bomber’s confession, however, bespoke his anti-Muslim bias and confirms what I stated above about how none of us escapes bias. Wright responds to Pipes’ response to the bomber’s confession: This got some fist pumps in right-wing circles, because it seemed to confirm that America faces all-out jihad, and must marshal an accordingly fierce response. On National Review Online, Daniel Pipes wrote that Shahzad’s “bald declaration” should make Americans “accept the painful fact that Islamist anger and aspirations” are the problem; we must name “Islamism as the enemy.” And, as Pipes has explained in the past, once you realize that your enemy is a bunch of Muslim holy warriors, the path forward is clear: “Violent jihad will probably continue until it is crushed by a superior military force.” At the risk of raining on Pipe’s parade: If you look at what Shahzad actually said, the upshot is way less grim. In fact, at a time when just about everyone admits that our strategy in Afghanistan isn’t working, Shahzad brings refreshing news: maybe America can win the war on terrorism without winning the war in Afghanistan. As a bonus, it turns out there’s a hopeful message not just in Shahzad’s testimony, but in Pipes’ incomprehension of it. Pipes exhibits a cognitive distortion that may be afflicting Americans broadly – not just on the right, but on the center and left as well. And seeing the distortion is the first step toward escaping it. Cognitive distortion. Wright points to it even more sharply and confirms the tendency that afflicts all; but in Pipes’ cognitive distortion Wright sees hope. Now on to the second cause for hope: Pipes’ confusion itself. For these purposes, it doesn’t matter whether Shahzad was telling the truth, because Pipes certainly thinks he was. Pipes applauds Shahzad’s “forthright © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page14   statement of purpose,” adding, “However abhorrent, this tirade does have the virtue of truthfulness.” So then why doesn’t it bother Pipes that Shahzad’s depiction of Islamic holy war as defensive counter-attack is the opposite of the depiction Pipes has peddled for years? How can he possibly hail Shahzad’s comments as confirming his worldview? It’s only human nature. Once you decide that some group is your implacable enemy, your mind gets a little warped. Virtually all incoming evidence is thereafter seen as consistent with that model. The same tendency to which he points in the case of Pipes’ reaction to Shahzad’s confession was at work in the Cold War according to Wright: This cognitive distortion reared its head in America’s previous cosmic struggle. Just about all cold war historians agree that Americans bought into the “myth of monolithic communism.” Once we decided that the communist menace was a single, vast, implacable force, we failed to appreciate, for example, tensions between Russia and China that in retrospect seem obviously important. We had our model, and we were sticking to it. Pipes has his model, and he’s sticking to it. He needn’t dismiss evidence inconsistent with it, because he can’t really see the evidence to begin with. This same tendency may now be impeding America’s ability to conduct the war on terrorism wisely…. The analogy with communism is worth dwelling on. People warned that if Vietnam fell, the dominoes would keep falling until America itself was under communist control. After all, Russia and China – the sponsors of our Vietnamese enemy – would join with the Vietnamese government to use Vietnam as a forward base if we were chased out. You know – kind of the way al Qaeda would join with a Taliban that controlled any chunk of Afghanistan to torment America. Wright ends the piece suggesting what Rifkin would affirm. I’ve been kind of hard on Pipes – in parts of this column and in an earlier column. So I’m glad to have the opportunity to emphasize that he’s just an example of the human mind at work, albeit a particularly revved up example. It’s only natural to attribute to your enemy more cohesion and menace than is in order. We used to do this with communism, and now we do it with radical Islam – and radical Muslims, for their part, do it with us. It’s a temptation we all have to fight. Maybe if we fought it as hard as we fight other enemies, we’d have fewer of them. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page15   Because this whole train of thought has been so much with me, over the past decade or so, I’ve taken note – even before Rifkin’s Empathic Civilization – of moments that have changed the face of history. And since reading Rifkin and deciding to address this matter today, I’ve clipped instances of reconciling moments when I’ve become aware of them. For example: In April-May 1940, nearly 22,000 Polish officer corps, intellectuals, professors, lawmakers, and professionals were murdered by Russia in the Forest of Katyn in Russia. The whole occasion is now being studied. (The official Russian version points to German responsibility.) That historical tragedy has been annually remembered by the Poles. Recently there has been communication between the Poles and the Russians. On February 10, 2010, Prime Minister Putin invited his colleague Donald Tusk to attend a Katyn memorial in April. The visit took place on April 7, 2010, when Putin and Tusk commemorated the 70th anniversary of the massacre. On April 10, 2010, a plane carrying the Polish President, Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 87 other politicians and high ranking military crashed in Smlensk killing all 96 aboard. They were on their way to attend the 70th anniversary of the massacre. That was the occasion for an op-ed column by Roger Cohen, appearing in the New York Times. Cohen wrote, My first thought, hearing of the Polish tragedy, was that history’s gyre can be of an unbearable cruelty, decapitating Poland’s elite twice in the same cursed place, Katyn. My second was to call by old friend Adam Michnik in Warsaw. Michnik, an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers, once told me: “Anyone who has suffered that humiliation, at some level, wants revenge. I know all the lies. I saw people being killed. But I also know that revanchism is never ending. And my obsession has been that we should have a revolution that does not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.” “Katyn is the place of death of the Polish intelligentsia,”Michnik, now the soul of Poland’s successful Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper, said when I reached him by phone. “This is a terrible national tragedy. But in my sadness I am optimistic because Putin’s strong and wise declaration has opened a new phase in Polish-Russian relations, and because we Poles are showing we can be responsible and stable.” Michnik was referring to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s words after he decided last week to join, for the first time, Polish officials © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page16   commemorating the anniversary of the murder at Katyn of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II. Putin, while defending the Russian people, denounced the “cynical lies” that had hidden the truth of Katyn, said “there is no justification for these crimes” of a “totalitarian regime” and declared, “We should meet each other halfway, realizing that it is impossible to live only in the past.” The declaration, dismissed by the paleolithic Russian Communist Party, mattered less than Putin’s presence, head bowed in that forest of shame. Watching him beside Poland’s Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, I thought of Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl hand-in-hand at Verdun in 1984: of such solemn moments of reconciliation has the miracle of a Europe whole and free been built. Now that Europe extends eastward toward the Urals. I thought even of Willy Brandt on his knees in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970, a turning point on the road to a German-Polish reconciliation more miraculous in its way even than the dawning of the post-war GermanFrench alliance. And now perhaps comes the most wondrous rapprochement, the Polish-Russian. Cohen concludes the piece on a strong note of hope. So do not tell me that cruel history cannot be overcome. Do not tell me that Israelis and Palestinians can never make peace. Do not tell me that the people in the streets of Bangkok and Bishkek and Tehran dream in vain of freedom and democracy. Do not tell me that lies can stand forever. Ask the Poles. They know. Another recent event on the world scene is the attack by Israel troopers on the flotilla heading toward Gaza in an effort to break the Israeli blockade. I need not rehearse that event. I refer to it only to give another example of how empathy or the lack of it has serious consequences. A New York Times editorial just yesterday records the continuing discord between Israel and Turkey, as the flotilla was supported by Turkey and nine Turkish citizens were killed in the Israeli operation. After the Flotilla Published July 9, 2010 Nearly six weeks later, Turkey and Israel are still stoking anger over the disastrous Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid ship. Their posturing and threats are playing into the hands of extremists. Both countries need to find ways to cool things down. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page17   Turkey is furious about the death of eight Turks and one TurkishAmerican in the raid. Israel claims that its soldiers acted in self-defense and that the flotilla was organized by radical activists, supported by Turkey, who were bent on provoking an incident. Israel’s government has opened its own review, with outside observers, but ha resisted calls for an international investigation – the only chance of getting Turkey to answer questions. Since the raid, Turkey has recalled its ambassador from Jerusalem, halted military exercises with Israel and banned Israeli military planes from its airspace. It is now threatening to sever all diplomatic ties if Israel does not apologize, compensate the victims’ families and accept an international investigation. Israel has withdrawn its defense advisers from Turkey, warned Israelis against visiting their once solid Muslim ally and impounded the seized ships. It is refusing to pay compensation or apologize. Of course, this is a minor moment in a massive international problem. Nonetheless, one sees how hardened positions lacking the empathic dimension can create a threat to global peace and well-being for all Earth’s children. One more example. This one again creating hope coming from yesterday’s Times. The headline: “For Final, South Africans Put Past Aside.” The “Final,” of course, refers to this afternoon’s World Cup Final between The Netherlands and Spain. The editorial notes many in South Africa will cheer for the Dutch because of the long colonial connection, even though what is brought to mind by that connection is apartheid and the oppression of blacks for so long. Reading that I was reminded of Nelson Mandela and the movie Invictus. If you haven’t seen it, do so. It is an inspiring movie about the inspiring man, Mandela, who after serving a total of 27 years in prison for his engagement in winning human rights for blacks, was elected the President of South Africa in 1994, serving a five-year term and, because of his age, choosing not to run for a second term. The movie records how Mandela used the South African rugby team to unite the nation. He realized the power of sports to bring people together. In 1995 South Africa hosted the Rugby World Cup and it was a powerful uniting force in South Africa, the Springboks defeating New Zealand in the final. Mandela presented the trophy to Springbok captain, Francois Pienaar, wearing a Springbok Jersey with Pienaar’s number 6 on it. That was a major step forward black and white reconciliation. Mandela had early experience with the Methodist tradition. It was, however, the Hindu Gandhi who influenced Mandela, putting him on the path of Satyagraha © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page18   – non-violent resistance – in South Africa. And Gandhi was greatly influenced by the Way of Jesus. I read from the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew 5: 38-48. Jesus transcends what was an advance in human relations – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – in other words, response in proportion to the injury. No taking of a life for a minor offence in other words. The Mosaic tradition had made progress to get to that point. But Jesus goes all the way – no violence. In his own ministry nonviolent resistance was his way. And the power of that non-violent resistance brought him to a crisis point. The powers that be, imperial and collaborating religious leaders condemned him to death – crucifixion. He died the way he died because he lived the way he lived. He died for a cause, the cause of God as he understood God and his people on whose behalf he brought his historical moment to a crisis. A cross, not a place of atonement for the sin of the world in my understanding but a place of integrity, authenticity, giving the seal of faithful love to his life and ministry. Therefore a symbol ever after of love and faithfulness to the end. I have on occasion confessed that for most of my ministry I did not preach on the Sermon on the Mount. I didn’t know what to do with it. My Christian faith was a salvation cult. I honestly, desperately desired people to believe and be saved. The Jesus of atonement provided salvation to be experienced here and consumated in the hereafter. I was sincere. I was passionate, and I missed the glory and wonder of Jesus. I just didn’t “get it” and I’m afraid the vast majority of the Christian church still doesn’t get it. Love your enemies, he taught. Love beyond the bounds of your clan, your tribe. Take your cue from God whose sun shines on the evil and the good, whose rain falls on the gardens of all indiscriminately. In a word, be mature as your Father in Heaven is mature. The Greek word telios is translated “perfect” but that gives the wrong impression. The word really means having attained the purpose/end for which one is created – thus perfect in the sense of full grown, mature. Talk about empathy! There you have it. The Greek word for love is agape. It is God’s love. It is a love that sees the value of another and affirms it. It is not eros – erotic love, though that is one of creation’s great gifts. It is not philia –brotherly (sisterly) love, wonderful as that is. It is agape – the love that in loving creates worth and value in the other. In the anguish of crucifixion Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they are doing.” That takes my breath away! True to the end. Loving to the end. Do we need a new American Dream? Dear God, yes! In a world become a neighborhood there is only one hope of survival – loving our enemies until they become friends. Refusing violence, making an end of war. © Grand Valley State University �Do We Need a New American Drean? Richard A. Rhem Page19   I regret it took me so long to find the Way of Jesus and move ever so slightly toward maturity – the maturity that is God-like. God have mercy on us all. References: Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization – The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: The Penguin Group, 2009. Jeremy Rifkin, “Empathic Civilization: Is It Time to Replace the American Dream?” The Blog, posted February 22, 2010. Robert Wright, “The Myth of Modern Jihad,” The New York Times, June 29, 2010. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Community Scripture Text Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:1-2, 14-21 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, 2009. Jeremy Rifkin, "Empathic Civilization: Is It Time to Replae the American Dream?" The Blog, posted February 22, 2010. Robert Wright, "The Myth of Modern Jihad,"The New York Times, June 29, 2010. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20100714 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-07-14 Title A name given to the resource Do We Need a New American Dream? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 14, 2010 entitled "Do We Need a New American Dream?", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Community, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:1-2, 14-21. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Empathic Civilizations Human Nature as Empathic https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/6fd22b2aa4aa037e7ffa01ca4989cd13.pdf e68daca02ce78ece3e492822f9835b01 PDF Text Text The Feeling which Remains When the Concept Fails Pentecost Sunday Isaiah 6: 1-8; Mark 1: 9-15 Richard A. Rhem Spring Lake Country Club Spring Lake, Michigan May 23, 2010 Prepared text of sermon Another Pentecost – The Festival of the Holy Spirit – fifty days after Easter. And next Sunday – Trinity Sunday – the Lord’s Day which brings the annual church year to its culmination after completing the cycle once again of the story of Jesus from birth to death-resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost. We are gathered on this Sunday not accidentally – I chose it in consultation with Mr. Bryson because this is Pentecost and next Sunday is the celebration of the Trinity. Consequently it allows us to mine the deep riches of the Christian tradition – its themes, liturgy and music. But even beyond the rich traditional sources for worship, is the focus of the theme itself – this evening Pentecost and Trinity. The last time we gathered as a community of friends it was at Christmas. The time before that it was All Saint’s Day. You see the pattern. I confess I love to celebrate these Holy seasons; it gives me a reason to dig once more into the story, the story of Jesus, the church’s story and relive again the moments of rich celebration and the message and meaning of these markers, these high points of our shared faith tradition. This is the shared story that has formed and shaped us, inspired us and given us hope and courage, comfort and consolation. I do love it. I love going back to the old story, the ancient celebrations, seeking to grasp the depths of truth that came to expression in the story and then reflect on how to bring to fresh expression from our historical moment what was seeking to come to expression in the ancient story and in the early Church Fathers. In fact, I have had half a notion to propose we form a church and we call it The Church of the Holy Seasons. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? We could set up an annual calendar – Christmas, Ash Wednesday/Lent/Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost/Trinity. I think I could handle four or five sermons a year. As for Mr. Bryson, he is still engaged about fifty-three Lord’s Days a year, so it would be no problem for him. © Grand Valley State University   �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 2   The Church of the Holy Seasons – I like that! Not bothered by buildings or budgets or staff – well, just a few tired ministers and a few wonderful volunteers gathering a community of old friends with many rich memories and shared story who still find meaning, guidance, hope and joy in the Story of Jesus and challenge in the Way of Jesus. The Church of the Holy Seasons with the service beginning at 6:00 and the bar opening at 7:00. Well, I play with you a bit about the Church of the Holy Seasons, but as for the Holy Seasons, I am serious. I love them and am still moved as we celebrate them together. The Seasons, the High Holy Days, tell a story. The story is obviously told in the cosmic, historical thinking of an ancient age. The world, the cosmos, the evolutionary unfolding of being as we know it, even with its deep mysteries still hidden, was not at all in their knowledge or understanding, but that does not mean they did not wonder about and wrestle with ultimate questions of life. They were conscious, self conscious, conscious of the other. They experienced birth and death, nature in its beauty and terror. And as far back as we have knowledge, they were religious in the sense of coming to terms with the Mystery of Being, with the meaning of human existence. Our own Christian tradition flows out of the Hebrew religious tradition and that tradition came to full expression in the Axial Age, the period usually dated from 800–200 before the Common Era. In China, India, the Middle East and Greece, without any interplay between them, there was an awakening of the human spirit and a new self-consciousness. I don’t mean to go into this in depth but only to say that there was a profound wrestling with the Mystery of Being, the meaning of life, and the cosmic reality. The great eighth-century prophets of Israel are part of this landscape and it is out of this historical nexus that our Christian story arose. This is a huge subject and I am not pursuing it any further except to say that our ancient story, which in many respects appears to be naïve, even child-like, was not that at all. With what knowledge was available to Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest of the Hebrew prophets and temple priesthood, they probed the ultimate questions of the human situation and sought to find a meaning and pattern in history’s unfolding, observing the temple rites, offerings and prayers. It was out of the womb of Israel that Jesus was born in the time of the Roman imperial domination of Israel and Judah. And the life, ministry and crucifixion of Jesus occurred in an ancient time but a time in which history was recorded. And the early Jesus movement, sensing still the presence of the crucified Jesus, declared his resurrection and were convinced Jesus whom they understood to be the Messiah or Anointed One was pouring out his spirit – that was the Spirit of God – on them, empowering them to tell his story and invite the world to believe in him whom they believed to be one with God. And they believed as well that © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 3   they were living on the edge of history whose curtain would soon fall and time would be no more. Of course, they were wrong on that. They had no clue about where they were on the calendar of history. But regardless of their ignorance of where they were in history’s calendar as well as their ignorance of history’s other great civilizations and, indeed, of the cosmic drama of 13 plus billion years of cosmic emergence, they were not ignorant of the existential reality of being human in the perilous historical journey. I go into this because here we are celebrating Pentecost and looking ahead one week to Trinity Sunday. Were our ancient forbearers simply naïve, unknowing and not to be taken seriously? If so why celebrate the Holy Seasons that stem from their story? The point I am trying to make as we celebrate the Festival of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity is that those ancient observances were a human response to deep religious experience – the experience of encounter with the Sacred Mystery of all being, or, in the shorthand of symbol, the experience of the Presence of God. The theologian Paul Tillich understood religious observance as “ultimate concern” and the term God as a symbol for the Ultimate. Tillich’s term was “The Ground of Being” which was an attempt to move that ultimate mystery from a, perhaps too familiar, personal category. Yet, if our being at its highest is the personal, it is unlikely that some aspect of the personal will be denied to the sacred mystery. Whatever! I stammer and stumble because I am trying to bring to expression an inexpressible reality. The most orthodox of Christian theology spoke of God’s incomprehensibility. Yet it has been a universal experience of humanity that God’s presence is known – in silence, vision or voice and responded to in the rich diversity of patterns of religious observances. And one such pattern of response has been the celebrating of the story of Jesus in the respective festivals of the Christian Year. My title for this meditation is perhaps a bit mysterious but that is only to be expected for a discussion of the experience of God, of the Sacred Mystery of all Being – “the feeling which remains where the concept fails.” This statement is a quote from a classic theological text, The Idea of the Holy, authored by Rudolf Otto described in the New World Encyclopedia as follows: Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869 – March 5, 1937) was an eminent theologian and religious scholar in the German Protestant tradition. He is particularly remarkable for his contribution to the phenomenology of religious consciousness and his work in the fields of comparative religion and the history of religion. Based on his research and observation, Otto © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 4   developed the notion of the “numinous” to express the reality of the sacred as the defining element of religious experience. Otto thus stressed the unique and essentially non-rational nature of religious reality, one that he saw as irreducible to other elements. This stood in stark contrast to the commonly accepted view of his time that the real essence of religion lies in universal ethical teachings that can be rationally justified. In the late 18th, early 19th century when the Protestant Christian theological endeavor was trying to come to terms with the Enlightenment that sought to reduce Christian faith to rational explanation and ethical teaching, Otto raised a forceful “No!”, claiming religious experience is a human experience that cannot be reduced to reason or ethics; rather, it is its own reality, a category of human experience beyond rational categories. In the forward by Otto to the first English edition (1923) Otto wrote: This book, recognizing the profound import of the non-rational for metaphysics, makes a serious attempt to analyze all the more exactly the feeling which remains where the concept fails and to introduce a terminology which is not any the more loose or indeterminate for having necessarily to make use of symbols. Otto registered a strong statement for the reality of religious experience – the experience of the “wholly other,” a designation for God which Karl Barth later picked up and popularized. The German title, Das Heilige, would be translated “the Sacred” or “the Holy”. The sub-title was “On the irrational element in the idea of the Divine and its relationship to the rational element.” Thus Otto in rigorous scholarly fashion was intent on taking into account both the rational and the irrational elements in the encounter with the Sacred Mystery – or, better, the rational and the trans-rational. It was his insistence on the trans or supra rational that set him apart from the climate of opinion of his times. Making a strong protest against the then current “domestication” of religious experience, his work made a strong impression and has had a renewal of interest from 1990 to the present, even though, as might be expected, he was criticized by conservatives because his insight called in question the exclusive claim of Christian theology, recognizing as he did, the common nature of religious experience in whatever tradition. He was criticized also by those who saw religion as simply ethics with a touch of passion. In spite of criticism from right and left, his work remains a significant marker for the reality of the religious phenomenon as a non-reducible, original category in its own right and, obviously, his work is a key element in the movement toward inter-religious dialogue and the study of comparative religions and the history of religion. The feeling which remains when the concept fails – I suspect that statement fascinates me because maybe it defines me – literally from youth trying to understand rationally what I have experienced beyond reason – the feeling that © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 5   cannot be denied even when I cannot explain it in terms of the concepts of rational discourse. The band of Jesus’ followers no doubt stayed together, no doubt bewildered, no doubt wondering what was next, no doubt sharing their loss, their grief and yet their sense that somehow, someway He was with them still. “He lives,” they exclaimed. They went back to their Scriptures, they tried to make sense of their experience. And then it was the Jewish Festival of Shavuot, the commemoration of the giving of the Ten Commandments fifty days after the Exodus. Jews came from throughout the empire to celebrate the Festival in Jerusalem and it happened – an overwhelming sense of the Presence of the Spirit of Jesus who was understood to be the Messiah, the word for anointed in Hebrew – the Spirit of Jesus which was the Spirit of God. It was an experience of the presence of God and they knew the ecstasy of being lost in wonder, love and praise. We have the event recorded in Acts 2. The story as related there must have an historical core whatever the actual event entailed. I am not really concerned with precisely what happened except to say as the Jewish Jesus Movement moved out and eventually became a Jewish/Gentile Jesus movement, indeed, the Christian Church, this event was looked back to as the birth of the Christian movement. That there should be an encounter with God was not novel. I read from Isaiah 6, the familiar record of Isaiah’s vision of God in the temple in the eighth century B.C.E. wherein he heard his call and responded, “Here am I, send me.” In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty… and the angelic hosts called Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; The whole earth is full of His glory. Isaiah writes of his horror before the awesome one, only to be touched, cleansed and assured by the angel ministering at the altar. What do you make of that? I also read from Mark’s Gospel. Before there was Pentecost or Easter or Good Friday, there was Jesus’ ministry. For Isaiah it was a time of crisis – the king was dead. For Jesus it was the Roman Imperial domination. John the Baptist was leading a Jewish renewal movement. Jesus came by and was baptized by John and as he emerged from the waters …he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Mark then tells us that the Spirit immediately drove him into the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and then interestingly Mark tells us, after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news. Then Mark tells us Jesus called his disciples and the preaching tour in Galilee ensued. I don’t think I ever juxtaposed the vision of Isaiah and the baptismal epiphany of Jesus before but it is interesting that both occurred at a time of political/social crisis. Both were grasped by a calling. Isaiah spoke of a people walking in darkness seeing a great light, a people to whom a child was born who would be among other designations the Prince of Peace. He spoke of the birth of a child who would be named Immanuel, a name signifying “God with us.” And again he wrote of a shoot from the stump of Jesse upon whom the Spirit of the Lord would rest. Don’t hear me attempting as is common in classic orthodoxy to see Isaiah predicting the birth and ministry of Jesus. What I am really attempting to suggest is the reality of the encounter with God, the reality of spiritual experience wherein is sensed a calling to point to an alternative world – a world marked by justice, compassion and peace. This was Israel’s vision at its finest as it came to expression through the prophetic word. And the same was true of the ministry of Jesus – a vision for which he was crucified by the established powers of Temple and Empire. So here we are on Pentecost. We have a story, the story of Jesus who emerges from the story of Israel and, in the wake of his life, death and ongoing presence, there is an overpowering experience of Jesus’ continuing presence and power calling those gathered followers to get on with the cause, to proclaim Jesus as the Way, the Truth and the Life. And we are here this evening because they did! The Jesus Movement was born and 2000 years later the story has reached us – the story of the Way of Jesus, the way of love, the way of peace. Next Sunday is Trinity Sunday. I’m sure you have been bored to death with sermons on the Triune God. I remember one I preached a few years ago – “One plus One plus One = One”. Rather cute I thought. Some of the finest minds the human family has produced have wrestled in deep philosophical endeavor to understand, define, describe the doctrine of the Trinity. Profound human thought has labored at the task. In a sermon from Riverside Church in New York City, the late great preacher, William Sloan Coffin, © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 7   referred to the primary author of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, Tertullian, and then wrote, I mention Tertullian’s debating because all doctrines really are born in debate. They are correctives, a way of saying “No, no, it’s this way, not that!” “God in three persons” is a corrective to a monotheism too narrow to take in Christ, and a corrective to all forms of dualism that seek to divide the world between spirit and matter, or appearance and reality, or the forces of good versus the forces of evil. “Three in One” says “One God, one world.” The theological struggle to bring clarity to the nature of God has had its place and in no way do I denigrate the theological endeavor of the centuries of the Christian tradition. As I said above, that task has engaged the finest minds of the human family over the centuries. I do think however we can perhaps see the whole religious phenomenon, including the Christian faith, more simply from where we are in the unfolding human story. All genuine religion is trinitarian. There is the mystery, the holy source, ground and goal of Being. There is the breakthrough of that Holy One, whether to Moses, Isaiah or Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed. And out of the respective encounters and callings there emerges a vision, a light, a teaching, a way. And the visionary responds to the encounter and call and gathers a community which adopts the vision and follows the way, creating rites and rituals, prayers, observances and sacraments, by which to keep the story alive and to be reminded of the way, and by means of which to teach the convert and the rising generation. The observances form the rhythm, the liturgy of life as it were, and shape the community, giving it form and identity. That’s why I, admittedly playfully, suggest we form the Church of the Holy Seasons. It is in the annual observance of the flashpoints of the Christian story that we remember the Story, that we are moved in our depths by that which has formed us, that we are touched anew with the Grace we first knew as we embraced the story and sensed we are embraced by the good and gracious God toward which it all points. The Holy Trinity? Simple: The Creative Mystery, our Source, Ground and Goal, has become human – has a face and breathes on us the breath/wind of life, so we know beyond knowing, for where the concept fails there is a feeling that remains and it is love and grace and peace. The Church of the Holy Seasons – we need a name because Christ Community Church is a name no more. In an E-zine, Ian articulated very well why it was time © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 8   – I would say overtime – that the name be changed. The logic of names and the reason for the change are expressed very well. I agree totally. Sometimes one understands oneself best by realizing what one is not. Ian and his leadership people have named themselves by that they are becoming and have become. Only one statement with which I disagree in Ian’s piece – saying they had many names submitted that expressed the need to “move from a narrow Christian name to something more universal and inclusive.” I suggest Christ Community was not a “narrow Christian name;” quite the contrary, it defined our movement to becoming a truly ecumenical community. Furthermore we put into practice the insight of Rudolf Otto that there is a common element in all religious experience – the revealing of the hidden mystery that is God beyond all human conceptions. Interfaith experience was a marvelous dimension of our community life. What that did, however, was, in understanding the other, help us to understand ourselves at a deeper level. I would suggest we became more Christian, that is, more reflective of the Spirit of Jesus even as we affirmed the truth and beauty of other ways. I bring this up because it is a teaching moment – maybe to create clarity as to why you are here and not there. One makes a choice to experience the Universal in the particular or to seek a Universal without particular definition. It is possible our brothers and sisters will be proven right over time. Perhaps the particular traditions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and all other traditions will fade and die in their particularity. If so some new vision/way/tradition will rise and fulfill the hunger of the human heart for the experience of God. To be honest, I’m not interested in that. I have no need or even curiosity about such a possible spiritual future. Bless those who do but as for me it is the Church of the Holy Seasons – it is the Holy Mystery that has a human face by whose grace the Spirit mantles my whole being. I would be so blessed if my children’s children’s children were marked with baptismal water in the sign of the cross. If our future generation were familiar with a table set with bread and wine, if they got goose bumps singing “Silent Night, Holy Night,” “O, Sacred Head, Now Wounded;” if they thrilled to the first organ chords of “Christ, the Lord, is risen today” and stood with moistened eyes as the choir sang “The Hallelujah Chorus,” if they sang “Spirit of the Living God, Fall afresh on me” and if they experienced moments so freighted with eternity that they could but sing Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty Heaven and Earth are full of your glory! Want to join me in the Church of the Holy Seasons? © Grand Valley State University �Feeling Which Remains when Concept Fails Richard A. Rhem Page 9   Reference: Rudolf Otto (1869-1937). The Idea of the Holy. First published in 1918; Second edition, Oxford University Press, 1958. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Pentecost Scripture Text Isaiah 6:1-8, Mark 1:9-15 Location The location of the interview Spring Lake Country Club References Rudolf Otto. The Idea of the Holy. 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1958 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20100523 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-05-23 Title A name given to the resource The Feeling Which Remains When the Concept Fails Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on May 23, 2010 entitled "The Feeling Which Remains When the Concept Fails", on the occasion of Pentecost, at Spring Lake Country Club. Scripture references: Isaiah 6:1-8, Mark 1:9-15. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Genuine religion as trinitarian Pentecost https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c81ebf04d3d22a61d91880716717372d.pdf 5efa757c01cd5b9180309e5cfe331efa PDF Text Text A Palm Sunday Peace Parade And a Personal Pilgrimage Luke 19:41-44; 23:32-34, 46 Richard A. Rhem Unity Church on the Lakeshore Douglas, Michigan Palm Sunday, March 28, 2010 Prepared Text of Sermon It was last fall when I received a call from Jan Weren inviting me to preach here at Unity Church on the Lakeshore. She was lining up Sunday speakers for the first quarter of 2010 and, having just begun, I had the whole period from which to choose a Sunday. I chose the last Sunday of the quarter, not to put it off as far as possible but, rather, because I saw that March 28, today, was Palm Sunday and Palm Sunday is my favorite Sunday to preach. I’ve come to recognize that in retrospect – one of the luxuries of retirement, which for me was June, 2004, is that one can reflect on the way one has come. I have been aware of my being gripped year after year by the Palm Sunday arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. Luke narrates much of his story of Jesus as a journey to Jerusalem. In 9:51 we read that Jesus set his face as a flint to go to Jerusalem. And it is particularly Luke’s account that moves me. Matthew, following Mark, makes it the triumphal entry of the king with tinges of nationalism which would be perceived as a threat to peace and order – and indeed there were many who would have loved it to be so. But Luke and John are clear – this is no display of nationalistic fervor – this is a Peace Parade. Not a war-horse but a donkey, an animal bespeaking humility. Not a military band but the voices of children. And Luke’s portrayal of Jesus on the crest of the Mount of Olives, surveying the city and weeping, moves me greatly. Luke’s portrait of Jesus was written over a half century after the events. By the time he wrote, the Temple at Jerusalem was an ash heap and the city no longer the center of Jewish faith nor of the Jewish Jesus movement. Thus, the words he puts in Jesus’ mouth as he overlooks the city from the Mount of Olives are not prediction but description of the actual situation when Luke wrote. But the core of Luke’s story, as well as that of the other Gospels, is most certainly true; Jesus came to Jerusalem. In the Synoptics he came only once; in John, three times. In any case, Luke, after the birth narratives, the Galilean ministry, puts Jesus on the way to Jerusalem (9:51). The crisis will build until it spills over in his tears; he weeps for the City. He needed not to be a predictor of © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 2 future events; any sensitive, insightful person might have known catastrophe was around the corner. In spite of his sense of the inevitable disaster, he entered the City and went to the heart of the religious, spiritual life of his people – the Temple. His coming was peaceful. Luke and John present it as such, using the images found in Zechariah 9:9-10 of humility, peacefulness, non-apocalyptic, nonpolitical. Jesus acted out symbolically his non-violent protest – he negated the Temple and all it stood for. It had become a den of thieves. The politics of domination and the economics of injustice were all tied up with the Temple as symbolic center, and Jesus’ symbolic action was the climax of his non-violent protest in the name of the God of justice. It was a dangerous, subversive action, for it called in question the legitimacy of the whole structural, religious, political, economic life of the Jewish nation under Roman imperial domination. For this action he was executed as a threat to the safety of the State. So, there Jesus is on the crest of Olivet overlooking the city – weeping, “O Jerusalem, if only you were able to recognize the things that make for peace … but they are hid from your eyes. Devastation approaches, for your violence in response to Roman violence will bring on greater violence and you will finally be destroyed, the Temple a charred ruin.” Going back over the last two decades of my ministry I discovered I had preached seventeen times on Palm Sunday and on seven of those seventeen I had used the passage from Luke. And even more significant for me, two of those seven were pivotal moments in my own understanding of Jesus, of the way of Jesus – indeed, of Christian faith itself. Two past Palm Sundays represent moments of epiphany, or perhaps more accurately, having experienced epiphanic moments as I wrestled with the message, I made, for me, fresh expression of the Gospel. It was Palm Sunday, April 15, 1984, that I preached on the subject, “Jesus, You Are Really Something!” I remember it well; it was a moment of discovery. While studying in The Netherlands in the late 1960’s I had purchased Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. In the days of heavy theological reading, Bonhoeffer’s little volume sustained me spiritually as he recorded his prison experience, which was the consequence of being a part of a group that sought to assassinate Hitler. Hitler ordered Bonhoeffer’s death in May, 1945, as the U.S. forces were closing in on the prison camp in southern Germany. On Palm Sunday, 1984, I confessed to my people a discovery – that the life of Bonhoeffer moved me more than the life of Jesus. This is what I said then: Jesus has no doubt been the greatest inspirer of human faith and life in the whole of human history. I have been reflecting on why his life has not been © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 3 more powerful for me. I think I understand why Bonhoeffer moved me more – or so it seems. I think it is because Bonhoeffer was of our time. He seems more human – more one of us. He took on Hitler – not the Jewish High Priest or the Roman Emperor. He was a man – just a man. But Jesus was something else. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the Church in her theological discussion has removed Jesus – the real, historical, human figure – from me. Yet the more I penetrate through the theological haze surrounding him, the more I see him for what he was, the more overwhelmed I am at the grandeur of his life, the more I am moved by his faith and commitment, the more I love him and want to be like him. It is a paradox; the more I see him in his full humanity, the more I am inclined to bow in worship before him…. Of course we cannot get back into the skin of those first Palm Sunday pilgrims. We cannot divest ourselves of centuries of theological discussion and church doctrine. Yet sometimes someone catches a glimmer of what it might have been like. For example, in the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, which some Christians picketed and of which many more disapproved, I personally think I see something of the power and the impact of that truly human existence. Mary Magdalene’s solo has always struck me – even moved me. Listen to the words: I don’t know how to love him, what to do – how to move him. I’ve been changed – yes, really changed in these past few days When I have seen myself. I seem like someone else. I don’t know how to take this. I don’t see why he moves me. He’s a man. He’s just a man. I’ve had so many men before in many ways, he’s just one more. Should I bring him down? Should I scream and shout? Should I speak of love, let my feelings out? I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about? Don’t you think it’s rather funny I should be in this position? I’m the one who has always been so calm, so cool, no lover’s fool… He scares me so. I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about? Yet, if he said he loved me, I’d be lost, I’d be frightened. I couldn’t cope, I just couldn’t cope. I’d turn my head, I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know. He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so. Whether true to the real feelings of Mary Magdalene or not, something of the confusion, the adoration and yet the drawing back in wonder must have been true of Jesus’ contemporaries. To meet him was to be changed by him. His power was not the power of coercion, but the power of grace; © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 4 not the overwhelming of pomp, but the weight of truth, of authenticity, of humility; it was the power of a person in whom God became transparent. That was Palm Sunday, 1984. Something very deep was going on in my being – Jesus, the human being, and the way of Jesus as the way of non-violent resistance, the way of peace was gripping me. I knew well enough the history of those early centuries of the Christian era. I knew of the intertwining of the Constantinean establishment of the Church, emperors calling church councils, and elevation of the man Jesus to the supernatural status of Son of God, second member of the Trinity. Jesus’ humanity was never denied. Indeed, in 451 C.E., the concise formula was rendered – Jesus, true God and true man. But I think my experience was not rare – the human Jesus got swallowed up by the Divine being. But for me, the man Jesus was emerging as the one I wanted to follow and in the ensuing decade became the one who more and more found expression in my preaching. The second significant pivot point in my own understanding of Christian faith came to expression on Palm Sunday, 1993. Again from Luke 19, my sermon title was “Jesus Died Because of Our Sins, Not For Our Sins.” This was a radical move because in making that claim, I was really denying the whole structure of atonement theology. In fact, I stood it on its head. I was beginning to see Jesus in the great tradition of Israel’s prophets and thus his concern for the very real historical context of his life – Roman imperial domination with establishment Judaism’s collaboration, oppressing the poor on the one hand and the revolutionary elements, the Zealots, plotting insurrection against Rome on the other. Jesus spoke truth to power. The common people heard him gladly. The authorities of religion and politics saw him as a threat to order – one that needed to be silenced. On that Palm Sunday, 1994, I said, Two thousand years ago, Jesus said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” Was not his point that there is only one way to deal with that which is so endemic to the human situation that spews violence and spawns response in violence? That is the way of sacrificial love – turning the other cheek; loving the enemy; embracing the one who despitefully uses me. Of course, you can’t run a world that way. But my point is, you see, God’s problem is not that God cannot forgive me. God’s problem is that God doesn’t seem to be able to change me. Jesus didn’t die so that I could have the sentence removed and I could have a passport to heaven. I mean, wouldn’t that be wonderful! I could say, “Yes, I believe. I’ll take that ticket. Thank you very much,” and remain unchanged. We have this neat theological system of Christian doctrine where the problem is our sin and the solution is Jesus’ death. Sin is removed, guilt is removed, and there is openness to God. Yet the world continues to be on the brink of exploding because in the human heart there is never any significant transformation. Not in my heart. And not in the hearts of the Muslim fanatics, and the Jewish © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 5 Orthodox, and the Christian fundamentalists. The problem is not that God can’t forgive my sin. The problem is God can’t break through to me. But, don’t you see, the word repentance comes from the Greek word metanoia, which means to change one’s thinking? The problem with the world is not that God can’t forgive the world of sin. The problem is that the world’s thinking will not change. We egg each other on, and we escalate the violence. We raise the stakes and nothing changes! The die was cast; my focus had moved from Jesus as the Divine Interloper who came to be a sacrifice for the sin of the world to Jesus, the fully human being who came to challenge the human structures of domination, political, religious, social – the Jesus whose non-violent resistance spoke truth to power. One Lenten season I taught my people a mantra which occasionally is repeated to me: He died the way he died because he lived the way he lived. In the last decade of my ministry it was issues of social justice and peace that occupied me. Happenings in the nation, the political scene and international relations became the arenas in which I applied the way of Jesus as I understood it. I was greatly energized but, to be honest, I have often despaired, because it seems violence, conflict and war are ever present. And, to be honest, I have despaired of the imperial designs of our own nation. There is a recent book by the journalist James Carroll whose title says it all – The House of War – the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. It is a history of the last seven decades, the history, thus,from the Second World War to the present. Generations of good and decent persons have led our nation, genuinely wanting peace, and we have carried a heavy burden of liberating people and ensuring peace. But that is only one side of the story. James Carroll documents the disastrous rise of American power. Through historical circumstances we have evolved into a powerful nation with a military that has become the shaping force of American policy. We are a military state upon which depends our economy, our industry, even our great research universities. In Carroll’s telling of the history through which I’ve lived, it is clear that, had our leaders the mind of Jesus, there would have been no Cold War with Russia and again, had the Way of Jesus informed our leadership following the end of the Cold War, there would be no problem of nuclear proliferation today. Thank God our nation and Russia have just agreed on a significant reduction of nuclear arms. But they could have been banished at the Cold War’s end. Lest I leave you in too dark a mood on this Palm Sunday, let me speak of a relatively new understanding of our human nature and the whole cosmic dance into which our lives are caught up. © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 6 Did you watch the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver? If you did, is there one moment in particular that stands out for you? For me it was the moment when Joannie Brochere, the Canadian figure skater, finished her first program – a brilliant performance and, at its completion, burst into tears. Her parents had come to Vancouver to support her bid for an Olympic medal. A day after arriving, her mother died of a heart attack. It was decided Joannie would skate nevertheless. She did. She did it beautifully – for her mother – and then burst into tears. I think there was not a dry eye in the Olympic stadium nor anywhere in the world where people were watching. The TV commentator Scott Hamilton’s voice cracked with emotion. In those moments the world was one, united in empathic embrace of that young woman. I use that phrase “empathic embrace” because at the time of this event I was reading a book by Jeremy Rifkin entitled The Empathic Civilization, (Penguin Group, 2009). He opens chapter one with an account of December 24, 1914, in Flanders, Belgium: “The evening of December 24, 1914, Flanders. The first world war in history was entering into its fifth month. Millions of soldiers were bedded down in makeshift trenches latticed across the European countryside. In many places the opposing armies were dug in within thirty to fifty yards of each other and within shouting distance. The conditions were hellish. The bitter-cold winter air chilled to the bone. The trenches were waterlogged. Soldiers shared their quarters with rats and vermin. Lacking adequate latrines, the stench of human excrement was everywhere. The men slept upright to avoid the muck and sludge of their makeshift arrangements. Dead soldiers littered the no-man’s-land between opposing forces, the bodies left to rot and decompose within yards of their still-living comrades who were unable to collect them for burial. As dusk fell over the battlefields, something extraordinary happened. The Germans began lighting candles on the thousands of small Christmas trees that had been sent to the front to lend some comfort to the men. The German soldiers then began to sing Christmas carols – first “Silent Night,” then a stream of other songs followed. The English soldiers were stunned. One soldier, gazing in disbelief at the enemy lines, said the blazed trenches looked “like the footlights of a theater.” The English soldiers responded with applause, at first tentatively, then with exuberance. They began to sing Christmas carols back to their German foes to equally robust applause. A few men from both sides crawled out of their trenches and began to walk across the no-man’s-land toward each other. Soon hundreds followed. As word spread across the front, thousands of men poured out of their trenches. They shook hands, exchanged cigarettes and cakes and showed © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 7 photos of their families. They talked about where they hailed from, reminisced about Christmases past, and joked about the absurdity of war. The next morning, as the Christmas sun rose over the battlefield of Europe, tens of thousands of men – some estimates put the number as high as 100,000 soldiers – talked quietly with one another. Enemies just twenty-four hours earlier, they found themselves helping each other bury their dead comrades. More than a few pickup soccer matches were reported. Even officers at the front participated, although when the news filtered back to the high command in the rear,, the generals took a less enthusiastic view of the affair. Worried that the truce might undermine military morale, the generals quickly took measures to rein in their troops. The surreal “Christmas truce” ended as abruptly as it began – all in all, a small blip in a war that would end in November 1918 with 8.5 million military deaths in the greatest episode of human carnage in the annals of history until that time. For a few short hours, no more than a day, tens of thousands of human beings broke ranks, not only from their commands but from their allegiances to country, to show their common humanity. Thrown together to maim and kill, they courageously stepped outside of their institutional duties to commiserate with one another and to celebrate each other’s lives. While the battlefield is supposed to be a place where heroism is measured in one’s willingness to kill and die for a noble cause that transcends one’s everyday life, these men chose a different type of courage. They reached out to each other’s very private suffering and sought solace in each other’s plight. Walking across no-man’s-land, they found themselves in one another. The strength to comfort each other flowed from a deep unspoken sense of their individual vulnerability and their unrequited desire for the companionship of their fellows. It was, without reserve, a very human moment. Still, it was reported as a strange lapse at the time. A century later, we commemorate the episode as a nostalgic interlude in a world we have come to define in very different terms.” But was it a lapse or was it an epiphany moment when what is deepest in our human nature came to expression in a most remarkable fashion? “Yet what transpired in the battlefields of Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 between tens of thousands of young men had nothing to do with original sin or productive labor. And the pleasure those men sought in each other’s company bore little resemblance to the superficial rendering of pleasure offered up by nineteenth-century utilitarians and even less to Freud’s © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 8 rather pathological account of a human race preoccupied by the erotic impulse. The men at Flanders expressed a far deeper human sensibility – one that emanates from the very marrow of human existence and that transcends the portals of time and the exigencies of whatever contemporary orthodoxy happens to rule. We need only ask ourselves why we feel so heartened at what these men did. They chose to be human. And the central human quality they expressed was empathy for one another.” Thus Rifkin begins an extensive portrayal of the empathetic core of human nature, the recognition of which is a relatively recent discovery and calls in question the traditional understanding of human nature. He points out that the official chroniclers of the human story – the historians – “have given short shrift to empathy as a driving force in the unfolding of human history. They write about social conflicts and wars, heroes and evil wrongdoers, technological progress and the exercise of power.” Only rarely is the other side of the human experience covered – the side that speaks of our deeply social nature and the evolution and extension of human affection. Rifkin continues: History, on the other hand, is more often than not made by the disgruntled and discontented, the angry and rebellious – those interested in exercising authority and exploiting others and their victims, interested in righting wrongs and restoring justice. By this reckoning, much of the history that is written is about the pathology of power. Perhaps that is why, when we come to think about human nature, we have such a bleak analysis. Our collective memory is measured in terms of crises and calamities, harrowing injustices, and terrifying episodes of brutality inflicted on each other and our fellow creatures. But if these were the defining elements of human experience, we would have perished as a species long ago. All of which raises the question, “Why have we come to think of life in such dire terms?” The answer is that tales of misdeeds and woe surprise us. They are unexpected and, therefore, trigger alarm and heighten our interest. That is because such events are novel and not the norm, but they are newsworthy and for that reason they are the stuff of history. The everyday world is quite different. Although life as it’s lived on the ground, close to home, is peppered with suffering, stresses, injustices, and foul play, it is, for the most part, lived out in hundreds of small acts of kindness and generosity. Comfort and compassion between people creates goodwill, establishes the bonds of sociality, and gives joy to people’s lives. Much of our daily interaction with our fellow human beings is empathic because that is our core nature. Empathy is the very means by which we © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page 9 create social life and advance civilization. In short, it is the extraordinary evolution of empathic consciousness that is the quintessential underlying story of human history, even if it has not been given the serious attention it deserves by our historians. Rifkin explains the relatively recent recognition of the empathic core of human nature: There is still another reason why empathy has yet to be seriously examined in all of its anthropological and historical detail. The difficulty lies in the evolutionary process itself. Empathic consciousness has grown slowly over the 175,000 years of human history. It has sometimes flourished, only to recede for long periods of time. Its progress has been irregular, but its trajectory is clear. Empathic development and the development of selfhood go hand in hand and accompany the increasingly complex energy-consuming social structures that make up the human journey. (We will examine this relationship throughout the book.) Because the development of selfhood is so completely intertwined with the development of empathic consciousness, the very term “empathy” didn’t become part of the human vocabulary until 1909 – about the same time that modern psychology began to explore the internal dynamics of the unconscious and consciousness itself. In other words, it wasn’t until human beings were developed enough in human selfhood that they could begin thinking about the nature of their innermost feelings and thoughts in relation to other people’s innermost feelings and thoughts that they were able to recognize the existence of empathy, find the appropriate metaphors to discuss it, and probe the deep recesses of its multiple meanings. We have to remember that, as recently as six generations ago, out greatgreat-grandparents – living circa mid-to-late 1880s – were not encultured to think therapeutically. My own grandparents were unable to probe their feelings and thinking in order to analyze how their past emotional experiences and relationships affected their behavior toward others and their sense of self. They were untutored in the notion of unconscious drives and terms like transference and projection. Today, a hundred years after the coming of the age of psychology, young people are thoroughly immersed in therapeutic consciousness and comfortable with thinking about, getting in touch with and analyzing their own innermost feelings, emotions, and thoughts – as well as those of their fellows. The precursor to empathy was the word “sympathy” – a term that came into vogue during the European Enlightenment. The Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote a book on moral sentiments in 1759. Although far better known for his theory of the marketplace, Smith devoted © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page10 considerable attention to the question of human emotions. Sympathy, for Smith, Hume, other philosophers, and literary figures of the time, meant feeling sorry for another’s plight. Empathy shares emotional territory with sympathy but is markedly different. Rifken connects empathy to its origins in sympathy and makes the distinction. The term “empathy” is derived from the German word Einfuhlung, coined by Robert Vischer in 1872 and used in German aesthetics. Einfuhlung relates to how observers project their own sensibilities onto an object of adoration or contemplation and is a way of explaining how one comes to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of, for example, a work of art. The German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey borrowed the term from aesthetics and began to use it to describe the mental process by which one person enters into another’s being and comes to know how they feel and think. In 1909, the American psychologist E.B. Titchener translated Einfuhlung into a new word, “empathy.” Titchener had studied with Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern psychology, while in Europe. Like many young psychologists in the field, Titchener was primarily interested in the key concept of introspection, the process by which a person examines his or her own inner feelings and drives, emotions, and thoughts to gain a sense of personal understanding about the formation of his or her identity and selfhood. The “pathy” in empathy suggests that we enter into the emotional state of another’s suffering and feel his or her pain as if it were our own. Variations of empathy soon emerged, including “empathic” and “to empathize,” as the term became part of the popular psychological culture emerging in cosmopolitan centers in Vienna, London, New York, and elsewhere. Unlike sympathy, which is more passive, empathy conjures up active engagement – the willingness of an observer to become part of another’s experience, to share the feeling of that experience… What does this tell us about human nature? Is it possible that human beings are not inherently evil or intrinsically self-interested and materialistic, but are of a very different nature – an empathic one – and that all of the other drives that we have considered to be primary – aggression, violence, selfish behavior, acquisitiveness – are in fact secondary drives that flow from repression or denial of our most basic instinct? Is there perhaps a different future than we have yet known? Might we be in an adolescent age with all its awful partisanship in our political life, the rage of © Grand Valley State University �Palm Sunday Peace Parade Richard A. Rhem Page11 extremists, the awful acid that oozes from radio and the blather of cable TV’s talking heads? Remember Joannie Brochere skating for her mom. Remember the Christmas Eve on Flander’s Field Jesus wept. So do I. But Jesus found the human cause worth dying for. So do I, for down deep, for all that makes us enemies, there is something deeper that makes us one. References Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. New York: The Penguin Group, 2009. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Palm Sunday Scripture Text Luke 19:41-44, 23:32-34, 46 Location The location of the interview Unity Church, Douglas References Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, 2009. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20100328 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-03-28 Title A name given to the resource A Palm Sunday Peace Parade and a Personal Pilgrimage Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on March 28, 2010 entitled "A Palm Sunday Peace Parade and a Personal Pilgrimage", on the occasion of Palm Sunday, at Unity Church, Douglas. Scripture references: Luke 19:41-44, 23:32-34, 46. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Jesus' Nonviolent Resistance to Domination Systems https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/c78751a73b554c1b04fb9398099fecb7.pdf 94277ccdd1ebfac0bc158072333d9983 PDF Text Text Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities and a Rumor of Angels Luke 2: 1-14; Micah 5: 2-5a Richard A. Rhem Spring Lake Country Club Spring Lake, Michigan Advent, December 20, 2009 Merry Christmas! It seems so natural to see you gathered before me with all the trimmings of the season, all the beautiful music, the evident warmth and joy of being with folks with whom there is such marvelous shared history and experience. Quite wonderful indeed! For me, preparing for such an event has its own familiar feel. I never fit the old preacher stereotype of moving every five or six years and turning over the sermon barrel. Remaining in one place has meant revisiting again and again the same high holy days, the same seasons of the Christian year and needing to find something fresh to say. I have operated all these years on the theory that a sermon was meant for a concrete community at a particular moment in their life and the historical context of that moment. Over the years people would say, “You should publish your sermons” or “Christ Community should go on television.” I was never tempted. It has always been my passion to form and shape, live with and experience life in one particular community – the community of which we were a part during those three and a half decades of our life together. Forgive an old man for a bit of nostalgia but, preparing for this worship experience, now that I’m retired gives me the luxury of going back and reviewing how the respective Festival Days were celebrated and it is those high points in the Christian year that provide a collage of the celebrations over all those years. I have enjoyed going back to file upon file – liturgies, prayers, sermons – to detect my own evolving understanding and the movement toward a full and rich liturgical worship experience which, together, we created. One interesting dimension of such a review is to determine what was happening in my own grasp and experience of “The Story” as it brought to expression the events of Jesus – birth, ministry, passion and death, resurrection and the gift of the Spirit. We can all tell the stories – Christmas, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost – and the stories are rooted in a concrete historical life. Yet the story is woven of legend and myth, magic and miracle. How does one who lives in a PostEnlightenment world marked by critical thinking find the meaning of the Story woven in myth and miracle? © Grand Valley State University   �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 2   That was a question we addressed years ago. You addressed it because I had to address it. I was nurtured and educated in a religious setting where the Story was taken literally – angels, stars, kings from the East, the manger, and shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. It took me years to understand the nature of story, of sign and symbol and many of you went on the journey with me. I smiled as I took up a sermon of 12-28-97. The title tells a lot – “The Fairy Tale is True.” Obviously by that time – actually years earlier – I had been freed from a deadening biblical literalism. But we did not all emerge into that heady freedom at the same time. And what made me smile was a sentence in the sermon which told why I was reflecting on the theme – “because of a few conversations I’ve had with some of you who have wondered how to receive the Christmas story – a story that begins, “And it came to pass…” and is laced with angelic announcements accompanied by a heavenly choir, magi from the East following a brilliant star that comes to rest over a stable wherein lies a newborn child born to a virgin.” I know exactly what was going on at Christmas, 1997; some of my people were struggling to hear the Story in a new way, fearing they would lose the heart warming sacred truth with which it was associated in their experience. We have all been there I think. Some emerge from the literalism of scriptural story more easily than others but that move to critical understanding is both necessary and a bit frightening. As I go back over the years I find it fascinating to be reminded of the sacred journey we have been on. If returning year after year to the same sacred celebrations brought its challenge to say something both significant and fresh, that possibility was aided by the fact that, although it was always the same Christmas or the same Easter, the moment of return was always in a new historical context. Current events often gave a contemporary relevance to the celebration. To cite just one example, on December 21, 1980, my sermon was “And It Came To Pass.” Those words traditionally introduce a story, perhaps one of our favorite traditional fairy tales. When you hear “And it came to pass,” you sit back and expect to hear a story. Already in 1980 I was suggesting that the Christmas story as told by St. Luke was such a story, introduced as it is in the King James Version with those words, “And it came to pass in those days…”. But something happened two weeks earlier – December 8, 1980 – John Lennon was shot dead as he was about to enter The Dakota, the building in which he lived, in New York City. And the Sunday a week before I preached the sermon on December 21, millions of people around the world gathered to mourn John Lennon and observe ten minutes of silence at the request of Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono. Over 100,000 gathered in Central Park. And what has all that to do with Christmas? Well, this was the young poet-singer who spoke and sang of peace © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 3   and love, who taught a whole generation to sing “Give Peace a Chance” which was heard that day at the Lincoln Memorial. This was the poet-singer who penned the lines we received on a Christmas card and have been shared with you before: Imagine By John Lennon Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, Above us only sky. Imagine all the people Living for today… Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, No religion too. Imagine all the people Living life in peace… Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people Sharing all the world… You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one. The tremendous outpouring of grief for John Lennon made me wonder at Christmas, 1980, why my message of the Prince of Peace seemed so ineffectual. Even more, it caused me to become aware of a deep human longing if only it could be tapped into. In that sermon I wrote: Could it be that within the human heart there is a huge void and emptiness that cries out to be filled with love, to be touched by grace? Thus, a current event shaped my experience and my preaching of the Christmas gospel in 1980 and, I would add, impacted my whole understanding of the human situation to which the Gospel was addressed. © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 4   And so, looking back over the years of our shared experience of Christmas, I came to a renewed awareness of how together we negotiated that passage from biblical literalism to a critical understanding of the Bible as the storybook of an ancient people in which were embedded the eternal questions of the human heart, and, secondly, how contemporary historical experience brings out ever fresh dimensions of the story. Over many Christmases past I entitled sermons in such a way that the nature of the Christmas Gospel as I understood it was reflected. For example, “The Fairy Tale Is True”, “Love Talk”, “A Rumor of Angels”, and “It Came To Pass…”. It is a beautiful story, as I indicated above, woven with miracle and myth, laced with legend and illumined by starlight, narrated by angels to fearful shepherds. And what we had come to see over many years was that the profound meaning embroidered with all the marks of story was the deepest truth of our human existence. The meaning that comes to expression in the Christmas Gospel is that the whole cosmic drama reflects a bias for life and the grain of the universe is Love. One Advent series leading up to the Christmas celebration was entitled “God in the Mirror of Christmas.” I remember that series as a breakthrough for me. No new discoveries about the Story as such; it was just that what our biblical tradition was saying about the nature of God struck me so powerfully – a child as the expression of God, God set forth in the vulnerability of a child, God revealed in a human face. And when we speak of God we are using a symbol for what is ultimate. Paul Tillich’s famous phrase – “The Ground of Being”– captures, to some degree, that to which we are pointing. The more we learn about this evolving cosmos and emerging reality the more we realize it is a whole continuing to come to ever fuller expression and we are the conscious products of that process, bringing to it awareness. So could we speak of God as the Generating Creative Center? Then the Christmas Gospel would be saying that at its Creative, Generative Center there is a bias for life, the vulnerability of love, the heart of compassion. That is an attempt to say something about the nature of reality. There is no scientific proof. We are speaking of a fundamental trust, a profound hope, a daring declaration concerning the nature of the cosmic process. No proof possible. Yet there is evidence everywhere that love and trust and compassion are the ingredients of a wonderful world where life flourishes and joy abounds. And the contrary is also easily documented: hate, mistrust and heartlessness drain the joy, destroy the peace and create fear and insecurity in the human heart. So this is where I come out from my nostalgic journey to Christmases past: We moved from biblical literalism in which we strained to document whether there was a decree sent out by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was Governor of © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 5   Syria and whether there was actually some astronomical phenomenon that might have been the Star in the East and soon, to an appreciation of the genre of Story in which the miracle and myth beautifully expressed become the vehicle for the declaration of a profound understanding of cosmic reality and human wellbeing – a vision of the nature deep down in things and the secret of human flourishing in the presence of the sacred mystery who is the creative generating source of being. Further, we realize how, although every Christmas celebration is the same in its story and manner of expression – carols and trimmings, parties and pageants – what is happening in the world brings out fresh nuances of the Story. It is to this historical moment in our nation’s history that I now turn. I entitled my meditation “Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities and a Rumor of Angels.” Let me move to the Tale of Two Cities – not Paris and London as in Charles Dickens’ famous novel but rather two cities that played a key role in the Christmas story – Rome and Bethlehem. I suspect you know me well enough to have a sense of what I want to say about those two cities that would address our contemporary situation in our nation and in the world this Christmas. Rome, of course, was the seat of the Roman Empire – the greatest ruling empire the world had ever known and still one of the greatest ever. I need not go into a thorough review of the greatness and the grandeur that was Rome. We are familiar with that history in its many dimensions – Roman law, Roman roads, Roman legions that pacified that ancient world at the time of Jesus’ birth. Luke uses the decree of Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered to bring Joseph and the very pregnant Mary to Bethlehem in Judea from their home in Nazareth, so that the birth of Jesus would be in Bethlehem, the City of David, thus fulfilling the prophetic promise. The registration reflected good Roman government – registration creating the order on which Roman rule was exercised and taxes collected. I remember in college or seminary being referred to a book by David R. Breed, The Preparation of the World for Christ (1918), which moves through the history of Israel, Greek civilization and to the Roman unification of the world – Israel’s hope, Greek language, Roman roads over which traveled Roman legions effecting the Pax Romana – The Roman Peace. Breed’s point, of course, was that the development of the ancient world in its various stages was God’s providential preparation of the world for the birth of Jesus, the Messiah, whose gospel would be proclaimed by St. Paul traveling those Roman roads to the far-flung territories of the Empire. What was missing in this treatise was any acknowledgment that the Roman legions were the empire’s agent of power, of military might by which the ancient world was subdued by Imperial Rome. The Pax Romana was an enforced peace on subject peoples. In the case of Rome and I believe every world empire, military might was the requisite. © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 6   This is not to say that there was not positive virtue in Imperial Rome and, indeed, a desire for peace in that ancient world. In his great work, On Being a Christian (1974, English translation 1976), Hans Küng juxtaposes the peace of Rome and the peace Jesus incarnated: In the year 42 or 41 before Jesus’ birth, at the beginning of the fifteen years of grievous civil war following the murder of Julius Caesar, the Roman poet Virgil in his famous Fourth Ecologue announced the birth of a world saviour. Was this an expression of hope in Caesar’s great nephew and adopted son Octavius and his house? In any case, when Octavius finally returned to Rome in the year 29, as sole ruler, after the victory over Anthony and Cleopatra, his first official act was to close the temple of Janus, the double-faced god of war. And “Augustus Divi Filius”– “Son of the divine one” (Of Caesar elevated after his death to be a state god), translated in the Greek East as “Son of God” – did everything possible to realize the hopes nourished by Virgil of The Utopia of an imminent reign of peace: Pax Romana, Pax Augusta, sealed with the consecration of the gigantic Ara Pacis Augustae, the Augustan altar of peace, in the year 9 B.C. In the same year (according to the famous inscription found in Priene in Asia Minor and later elsewhere) the “gospel” (euangelion, “good news”) of the birthday of the “Saviour” and “God” who had now appeared – Caesar Augustus – was proclaimed in the East to the whole world: the saviour who had brought to the broken world new life, happiness, peace, fulfillment of ancestral hopes, salvation. (p. 438) There is no need to write off the noble aspirations of Caesar Augustus and his contemporaries. Has there not always been a dream of peace and wellbeing in the human heart, a longing for safety and security? Nonetheless, the peace Augustus desired and Rome for a long period of history provided is a different peace than that to which the way of Jesus leads. Küng is clear. It is in fact obvious that even the apparently idyllic Christmas story has very real social-critical (and, in the broadest sense, political) implications and consequences. This is a peace opposed to the political savior and the political theology of the Imperium Romanum which provided ideological support for the imperial peace policy: it is a true peace which cannot be expected where divine honors are paid to a human being and an autocrat… We need only compare Luke’s Christmas Gospel with the Gospel already mentioned of Augustus at Priene to see how the roles here are exchanged. The end of wars, worthwhile life, common happiness in a word, complete well-being, man’s “salvation” and the world’s – are expected no longer from the overpowerful Roman Caesars but from this powerless, harmless child. (p. 452f) © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 7   Obviously, I use Rome and Bethlehem as symbols of two contrasting kinds of peace, of two contrasting visions of the nature of a peaceful world – the one represented by the Roman Emperor however noble, however much desiring peace in the world, and Jesus or the Way of Jesus bringing peace of quite another kind. On Christmas Eve, 1994, I used the same texts as this evening – Micah 5:5, “…and he shall be the one of peace” and Luke 2:15, “…and on earth peace.” I cite the 1994 Christmas Eve meditation because I had pointed to the difference between the peace of empire and the peace of Jesus and made reference to what was happening on the global scene – the Balkan tragedy, the, at that time, fragile, relative peace in Bosnia after all the bloodshed. I went on to say, Luke was writing of the birth of One, from the other end of the story, because, remember, Luke wrote the birth after the death. Luke wrote of the birth after the resurrection. Luke knew the hell that Jesus had gone through, but Luke’s gospel of Jesus, which speaks of peace in the beginning, is a peace that was a peace to be secured only in the Way of Jesus. It was the Way of Jesus, as opposed to the way of Rome. It was a peace that was based on the end of all human domination. That, Luke was telling us in his gospel, was the peace that came through Jesus Christ. It was not the peace enforced by the power of Rome, but the peace that comes from God, to those who follow the Way of Jesus. I referred to the then current conflict, the human suffering, the terrible violence and killing and related the experience of a few of us who had toured Europe that fall and visited the Normandy beaches and the D-Day museum at Caen, France, where a film graphically depicted the terror of D-Day fifty years before. The day we visited the Beaches it was beautiful, so calm and peaceful. One could hardly imagine the horror of 1944. I said, A couple of months ago I visited the shores of Normandy, the fiftieth anniversary of the scarred earth where that horrendous battle was fought. A week ago, perhaps some of you saw as well the special by David Brinkley on the Battle of the Bulge, fifty years ago. Did you hear in that special a recording of the voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said fifty years ago at Christmas, “It is not easy to wish the nation a Merry Christmas this year, nor to those who are standing for us around the world.” It was a world at war, and a terrible price was exacted. There are those that suggest that maybe the past fifty years were better. But were they? Just five years ago we were so euphoric at this time of year because the Berlin wall had fallen and we thought that maybe the world was taking a significant step toward peace. The collapsing of an impasse of terror that held the world at bay for fifty years evaporating, allowed these ancient feuds to surge forth again. So in 1994 at Christmas we speak of the peace of Jesus. But there is no peace. You see, we think of peace in terms of the © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 8   balance of power and of political possibilities, but there is only one way to peace – it is the way of human community. It is by the ending of all human domination. I have pointed out in this meditation that each returning Christmas, while replete with all the accoutrements that we so much love, nevertheless has its own special and unique aspect determined by what was happening in the world at that time. This meditation takes its cue not from some global happening at present but rather from my own personal experience of reflection on the gospel of peace and the history of our own nation in the century past to the present time. This is not something new. As I have indicated, it has been my practice over the decades of ministry at Christ Community to relate the gospel to world happenings. But recently reading a book authored by James Carroll entitled House of War has made a deep impact on me. The subtitle is “The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.” James Carroll is the author of Constantine’s Sword, a history of the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish people and I used it for a Wednesday evening class a few years ago. It is an excellent historical study. House of War even exceeds Constantine’s Sword in my opinion. I have seldom been more engrossed in a book or more impacted. I suspect that is because Carroll narrates the history through which I’ve lived – events I remember from the time, people in government and on the world scene with whom I am familiar, crisis points, breakthroughs that were celebrated. He is eight years younger than I am but what he recounts really begins with World War II and continues to the first years of George W. Bush’s administration, which means to 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. Carroll’s review of that history has a unique perspective in that his father was a FBI agent working for J. Edgar Hoover, and then was appointed to be the first Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made an Army General and located in the Pentagon. The Carrolls were a strong Irish Catholic family and James, growing up in the shadow of the Pentagon, decided to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood, which delighted his father. It was during his seminary years that the popular revolt against the Vietnam War arose. He identified with that protest, being greatly influenced by the Catholic protest movement led by the Berrigan brothers. Carroll’s identification with the anti-war movement led to a serious break with his Brigadier General father, recounted in an earlier book, An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us. I cannot here do more than attempt to identify what so deeply impacted me reading House of War. As the history of the past six decades was recounted, I came to see how we have come to our present state of global empire. Earlier I spoke of a certain idealism and hope for peace that marked the Roman Empire. © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page 9   In the case of our own nation, that is certainly true as well. There have always been generations of good and decent persons leading our nation, genuinely wanting peace. And it is true as well, as our President said in his Oslo speech as he received the Nobel Peace Prize, America has carried the heavy burden of liberating people and ensuring peace in the world. But that is only one side of the story. And this is where James Carroll’s documentation of the disastrous rise of American power is so powerful, illuminating and distressing. Through historical circumstances we evolved into a powerful nation with a military that has become the shaping force of American policy. We are a military state upon which depend our economy, our industry, even our great research universities. Let me refer to just two critical moments in the history through which we have lived. The first moment was what to do with the newly discovered nuclear power. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote a memorandum to President Truman. Carroll writes: It was another of those events dated September 11, each one the center of a world in collision with other worlds. The impact of such collisions is our subject. On September 11, 1945, four years to the day after the groundbreaking of the Pentagon, fifty-six years to the day before the Al Qaeda attack on the Pentagon, less than a month after Japan’s surrender, and just over a month after the detonation of the Nagasaki bomb, Stimson composed an urgent “Memorandum for the President,” which began, “Subject: Proposed Action for Control of Atomic Bombs.” First Stimson told the president what the dawning of the nuclear age meant: If the atomic bomb were merely another though more devastating military weapon to be assimilated into our pattern of international relations, it would be one thing. We could then follow the old custom of secrecy and nationalistic military superiority relying on international caution to prescribe [sic] future use of the weapon as we did with gas. But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a first step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to fit into the old concepts. I think it really caps the climax of the race between man’s growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group-control – his moral power. If so, our method of approach to the Russians is a question of the most vital importance in the evolution of human progress… The crux of the problem is Russia. Carroll comments further: “To put the matter concisely,” Stimson wrote, he proposed that the United States take immediate steps to “enter into an arrangement with the © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page10   Russians, the general purpose of which would be to control and limit the use of the atomic bomb.” He suggested that by bringing the Soviets into our confidence, they would have reason to believe it when Americans said that “we would stop work on any further improvement in, or manufacture of, the bomb as a military weapon, provided the Russians and the British would do likewise.” This meant, and Stimson proposed it, that Washington would “impound what bombs we now have in the United States provided the Russians and the British would agree with us that in no event will they or we use a bomb as an instrument of war unless all three governments agree to that use.” Give up the secret. Give up the monopoly. Give up sovereignty over use. Give up control of existing bombs. Stimson, in the cover letter that accompanied this memo, summed up his proposal by using the word “share” twice. (p. 113 f) Carroll relates how Stimson’s grasp of the situation with Russia in light of the atomic bomb was countered by Secretary of State James Byrnes. Carroll’s account is so fascinating because he gives us a glimpse behind the scenes from the perspective of history as to the tensions and arguments that raged at the time. Writing of Stimson, Carroll relates, So now he warned that relations with Moscow “may be perhaps irretrievably embittered by the way in which we approach the solution of the bomb with Russia. For if we fail to approach them now and merely continue to negotiate with them, having this weapon rather ostentatiously on our hip, their suspicion and their distrust of our purposes and motives will increase.” This reference to the atomic bomb “ostentatiously on our hip” is a tip off that this memo was essentially an argument against fiercely anti-Soviet positions then being taken by Secretary of State Byrnes, who had already proven to be something of a nemesis. Stimson had, the week before, criticized the way Byrnes was preparing for an upcoming meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London: “Byrnes [is] very much against any attempt to cooperate with Stalin. His mind is full of the problems with the coming meeting of the foreign ministers and he looks to having the presence of the bomb in his pocket, so to speak, as a great weapon to get through the thing he has.” Very much against Byrnes, in one of the most remarkable statements ever made by an American statesman, Stimson presumed to assert in his September 11 letter to Truman, “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show him your distrust. I conclude the first critical moment by underscoring these last lines – the matter of trust. Trust or fear leading to mistrust; fear that often blooms into paranoia and a world community market by paranoia is a dangerous place. © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page11   Do you sense that the whole disastrous tragedy of the Cold War could have been avoided? Do you sense that at that critical moment in the history of the twentieth century trust could have changed the impasse of terror through which we lived on the brink of disaster? One more critical moment – the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. We remember it well – the euphoria, the relief, the high hopes for a world at peace. From James Carroll filling in the background of the Reagan/Gorbachev encounters. I was struck by the stature of the Russian leader. It was he, not Mr. Reagan that created the possibility and effected the reality of the end of the Cold War. But this I point to because for the United States it was another missed opportunity – a missed opportunity to disarm the nuclear weapons that both sides stockpiled because of that earlier missed opportunity when we could have averted that arms race before it began. Russia wanted to disarm; we did not. Why trouble you with this history and the rise of American power at Christmas? Simply because it is Rome and Bethlehem all over again. I have been critical of American imperial designs for some time, especially since the rise to power and prominence of the neo-conservative movement that advocated the unipolar world, the United States, the one world superpower doing whatever was necessary to maintain its preeminence. But I’ve never seen before so clearly the creeping militarism that has led to our present state. It is Rome all over again; the peace ensured by force of arms. Multitudes of good people, well-meaning people become captives of the drive towards empire maintaining “peace” by “military might.” That to which I point involves such a complex of philosophical, political reasoning and argument. I suspect we could get into a good free-for-all if I allowed an open mike; but I am not interested in argument or debate. I am not interested in scoring points or winning an argument. I have the privilege by your good grace of bearing witness in the beauty of this Christmas season to my deepest intuition, my highest aspiration. It is this: peace on earth will not be finally accomplished by political strategy or military power. Peace on earth will come only in the Way of Jesus, a way of non-violence – not pacifism, a passive response to one’s world – but non-violent resistance to evil and darkness, and positive offering of trust, of grace, of love, of compassion, of being willing to die rather than be untrue to those virtues. The vulnerability of a child as a mirror of the heart of God – a child in obscure Bethlehem a sign of a Love which Imperial Rome and the great Caesar Augustus could never vanquish. Only such love incarnate in earth’s multitude holds the possibility of Peace on Earth – indeed of a human future. © Grand Valley State University �Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities… Richard A. Rhem Page12   Will I have another Christmas in which to bear my witness? Perhaps not. Let then this be my last witness and plea: the Way of Jesus is the only way to peace, freedom from fear, freedom to live in love and grace. References: James Carroll. House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2006. Hans Küng. On Being a Christian. Published in 1974; English translation, 1976. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Advent Scripture Text Luke 2:1-14, Micah 5:2-5a Location The location of the interview Spring Lake Country Club References James Carroll. House of War, 2006. Hans K Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20091220 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-12-20 Title A name given to the resource Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities and a Rumor of Angels Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on December 20, 2009 entitled "Love Talk: A Tale of Two Cities and a Rumor of Angels", on the occasion of Advent, at Spring Lake Country Club. Scripture references: Luke 2:1-14, Micah 5:2-5a. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/42f6e0b660eb34ebe37d38bd20a264c9.pdf 166603baf6801f916dd4a9545ae298ea PDF Text Text Symbol and Ritual: Healing the Heart as We Say Goodbye In the Presence of Mystery Ecclesiastes 3:1-23; II Corinthians 4:16-5:5; I Corinthians 15:20 Richard A. Rhem Grand Haven Community Center Grand Haven, Michigan All Saints Day, November 1, 2009 Transcription of the spoken sermon Having decided that we would gather once again as dear friends with wonderful shared memories, the next thing was to find a date. Being retired I’m always available but, in the case of Mr. Bryson, that is not the case. He seems to get busier as the years go by as congregations ply for his services. And then to find a date free on his calendar that coincided with an open Sunday on Gwenneth’s calendar was the challenge. The first such date was today, November 1, which happens to be All Saints Day. The date was set sometime near the end of August, the time of the funeral of Teddy Kennedy. Nancy and I spent nearly eight hours in front of the TV that day, totally immersed in the event. I knew immediately what I wanted to deal with this morning – the Funeral Mass of the Resurrection and All Saints Day – it brought back a flood of memories and emotions. There were several moments throughout that Saturday that I sat with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat as I was touched by the grandeur of the cathedral, the great organ, the strong processional hymn, the liturgy, the vestments – all the great pageantry, the solemnity, the celebration of a life in the reality of death before the Sacred Mystery, in the presence of God. It was, for me, so deeply moving – and I knew that today I wanted to reflect on all of that because I realized so poignantly what I have missed not having a community of faith with whom to share the unfolding Liturgical Year – not only the unfolding Christian Year as season follows season, but even my week – I cannot remember what day it is whereas I used to be able to click off all the Sunday dates for months to come. The calendar with the seasons; the liturgy with the respective celebrations – They gave structure to life along with familiar celebrations, songs, scripture, symbols and color – all of it creating life’s mosaic with beauty and form. I did so love it and I miss it. The annual celebration of the Christian Year or Church Year came to be the most important calendar for me – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and the season of Eastertide culminating in the Festival © Grand Valley State University   �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 2   of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. The secular holidays couldn’t hold a candle to those High Holy Days. The fact that I could be so moved by the Kennedy Funeral Mass and celebration points to a major movement in my life and my religious experience. Like many of you I was raised in the tradition of the Protestant Reformation. Were I preaching today at CCC of old, the Reformation theme probably would have found expression unless we decided to celebrate the previous Sunday so as to keep today for All Saints. It was the Eve of All Saints that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenburg. Halloween was really Hallowe’en –shortened for All Hallows’ Even – the Eve of All Saints' Day –November 1. A web site, History.com, gives a history of the day which originated among the Celtic people in Ireland, Britain and Northern France 2000 years ago; it was their New Year celebration. By A.D. 43 the Romans had conquered those lands and in the course of the 400 years they ruled the Celtic Lands, they introduced two festivals of Roman origin which were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain (pronounced sowin). Feralia was a day in October which commemorated the passing of the dead and Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees, was the second festival combined with Feralia to celebrate the Celtic New Year Samhain. The current celebration on November 1 probably originates from the time of Pope Gregory III (d. AD 741) and was likely first observed on November 1 in Germany. There is some dispute about the history and earlier connections. As happened so often in the history of the church, a secular or cultural festival was “baptized” and given a Christian significance. The Pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. 1000, the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints, All Saints, and All Souls, were called Hallowmas. But, back to how Reformation Day and All Saints’ Day point to a movement in my own religious experience – and because you were with me through this evolution, it has probably changed your religious experience as well. I never really reflected on the significance of the close connection between the celebration of Reformation Day and All Saints’ Day. For me, in my nurture and training, the Reformation marked a turning from the Christian Year, the Liturgical framework, the celebration of the Mass, honoring and praying to saints, the vestments and the whole ambiance of worship space. As one silly example, in my early years of © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 3   ministry I would insist on a central pulpit – not a divided chancel with lectern on one side and pulpit on the other with the Communion table or “altar” central. Protestant Reformed worship was centered in the Word. Some of you may remember the earlier sanctuary, now the parlor, where the pulpit was centered and elevated while the Communion table was on the floor level below the pulpit. Architecture matters! When I returned here in 1971 the sanctuary had been redone. The pulpit was to the congregation’s left, the table raised to the chancel level with a worship center focus with cross and candles. By now you may wonder why I’m making so much of this, but stay with me because I’m attempting to give a graphic picture of what was for us – for me as Pastor, you as people, a major shift in religious understanding and experience. Moving from a strong celebration of Reformation Day to an increasingly significant celebration of All Saints’ Day charts a major movement in our worship life reflecting a major new perspective on the meaning of Christian worship. My experience - which I think I can say was our experience - was movement from the head to the heart. This is not to deny that there was “Heart” in traditional Reformed worship. Nonetheless, the address was to the mind, a rational, if passionate as well, exposition of the Scripture read through the lens of the Theological System. As I reflect back over the years I remember one particular moment when the lights went on for me; it was an “aha moment.” I’m sure it was over 30 years ago. My dear friend, Herman Ridder, had been President of Western Theological Seminary in Holland. Soon after I returned here in 1971, “Bud” as I called him, left the seminary to pastor the Central Reformed Church of Grand Rapids. We established a strong friendship, shared resources, and were in frequent contact. On one occasion he suggested we attend a continuing education event at McCormick Seminary in Chicago, a Presbyterian school. The theme was a fresh look at the Apostle’s Creed. At a Lutheran Seminary in the same complex of schools was a great theologian, Joseph Sittler, who led one of the sessions. I don’t remember what his specific topic was but I shall never forget one of his “throw away lines” – whatever point he was making, he looked at the group and said, “You Presbyterians always go through the head. The Catholic tradition addresses all the senses. There is pageantry, fabric, color, incense, vestments, banners, candles, etc. They approach the whole person, not just the intellect.” Well, it was one of those moments. I said to myself, “Oh, my goodness, he is right!” Nurtured in Reformed theology, the Heidelberg Catechism, the centrality of preaching, I suddenly realized how much the churches of the Reformation were in reaction against the Roman Church from which they separated. Of course, there was need for reform and renewal but, as is true of great institutions, © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 4   they don’t bend easily or recognize the need to change until it’s too late and there is brokenness, alienation and division. So it was in the 16th century. The consequences of the break can be seen nowhere more clearly than in worship. Let me set that forth vividly by contrasting the worship life of the divided Body of Christ. The Roman Church continued with its Christian Year or Church Year, its festivals, its liturgy, its church architecture, symbols and vestments. And, in reaction, the Protestant tradition, in its Reformed expression, “cleansed” itself of all the accoutrements of the worship experience. And in its place? – the preaching of the Catechism. The Heidelberg Catechism stemming from the 16th century (1563) is the most beloved and formative of the catechisms to arise in that era of Reformation. It consisted of 129 questions and answers divided up into 52 Lord’s Days – one for each Sunday of the year. When I was ordained in 1960, the requirement for a minister was to cover the points of doctrine contained in the Catechism once every four years. The Christian Reformed Church required the Catechism be handled annually. Reviewing it again I was struck by the careful delineation of the Christian faith as understood in the wake of the Reformation division of the church – understood by the reformers and set forth in very rational discourse with the precision of careful logic – it was indeed an intellectual document. The first question and answer begins with a warm pastoral note: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” The answer: “That I with body and soul in life and in death am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ….” Then Question 2: “How many things are necessary for you to know that you may live and die happily?” And the answer: “Three things: First, the greatness of my sin and misery; second, how I am redeemed from all my sins and miseries; third, how I am to be thankful to God for such redemption.” There you have the outline of the Catechism. Question one and two comprise the first Lord’s Day. Then follow the three divisions of the catechism – as someone has named them – guilt, grace and gratitude. In the first section our fallenness is set forth. The second part deals with our redemption through the atoning death of Jesus Christ whose death satisfies the demands of God’s justice and also in this section the Apostle’s Creed is explained. Section three sets forth a life of gratitude for salvation through a life of obedience and prayer – the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer being exposited. It is in this section in the treating of the © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 5   second commandment that I was struck by the flash point of the great divide between traditional Catholic worship and the worship of the newly emerged churches of the Reformation. We find a fascinating question and answer concerning the second commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath…” Regarding the second commandment the catechism asks what God requires – the answer: “We may not make any image of God… No images at all? No. But may not pictures be tolerated in churches as books for the laity?” And here is the crux: “No; for we should not be wiser than God, who will not have his people taught by dumb idols, but by the lively preaching of his word.” With the distance of centuries and a pinch of objectivity it is easy to feel the negative tone of such an assertion. The Reformation movement certainly had various facets, but one obvious reaction was against the symbolic drama of the Catholic pageant of salvation as it was played out in the liturgical celebration of the Mass. In stark contrast to the richly symbolic, sensual Eucharistic drama was the church, barren and plain, dominated by a high pulpit from which was proclaimed the Word of God. You may remember my experience which I’ve shared on several occasions. I was in Leiden where I had lived for four years. On a Saturday evening I visited one of the great old cathedral-like Protestant churches, the Hooglandse Kerk. It had recently been renewed in its interior. There was the High Pulpit attached to one of the great columns, folding chairs set up around it, an organ with pipes displayed – the only ornamental, though also functioning element in that vast white-washed space. It was clean and bright and sterile. Then I moved down the street and entered the one Catholic church in Leiden. It was like entering a warm womb – lighting was dim, candles glowed, windows of stained glass, the chancel with the altar the obvious center where the drama of the Mass was enacted. Visiting those two churches in one evening was a striking visual and visceral experience of what Joseph Sittler had pointed to at the seminar at McCormick Seminary – “You Presbyterians (Reformation folk) address the head. The Catholic tradition approaches the whole person through all the senses.” About the time of that seminar, Mr. Bryson came to us as Director of Music and Fine Arts. In the beginning he was also directing the St. Mary’s music program and thus brought with him not only his own artistic sensitivity but the experience of the Catholic liturgy. Fortunately, Joseph Sittler had shocked my consciousness © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 6   about the nature of worship. In response to Sittler I remember as though it were yesterday saying to myself, “Why must one choose between ‘the lively preaching of the Word’ and the rich, sensual, liturgical experience as practiced in the Catholic Church?” From that moment I attempted to combine the best of the Reformation and Catholic worship. The result, in my not unbiased opinion, was a thing of beauty. Oh, there was some grumbling – the sermons were too long, there was too much music… Services so rich in their offerings couldn’t be pulled off in an hour! But for the most part I think we all agreed that we had found a formula for moving corporate worship experience which stimulated the mind and moved the heart. It consisted of intelligent articulation of Christian faith – its claim, its hope, its comfort and its challenge – wrapped in meaningful liturgical movement and artistic expression that created as aesthetic experience that elevated the soul. To return to where I began, it was that movement in my understanding and sensitivity that caused me to watch the funeral celebration of Teddy Kennedy with rapt attention and deep emotion. While I was experiencing the moving of my own being, I was also aware of myself in the experience. I was so deeply aware that my heart dwells in the deep mystery of life, of living before the Sacred Mystery we call God. I was aware of how much I missed the liturgical framework of the Church Year that moved me through the seasons as we celebrated the life of Jesus – life from birth through ministry, passion, death and resurrection and the Spirit’s gathering of that Apostolic church community. A lot going on there, you might say, but it was so and I think I know why that was so. It was because that whole funeral celebration from the entrance to the cathedral to the final committal was for me so rich in memory – memory of such deeply meaningful experience over many years. There were those who said my best preaching was at funerals and I will admit to the rather strange fact that funerals were my favorite time to preach. I think that is because there one is faced with life’s ultimate mystery, death, and I think the impulse to religion is probably fed by the fact that we shall all die. And again in the celebration of the Christian year we are brought face to face with our mortality. Ash Wednesday was one of my favorite services. At Lent’s beginning, we were invited to begin a period of disciplined practice that would lead us to Holy Week – Good Friday and then Easter and the celebration of Resurrection. You came down the aisle and we looked into your eyes and, as we placed on your forehead the ashes in the sign of the cross, we repeated the solemn words from the Genesis story of the fall of the human creature – solemn words of judgment: “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.” (Genesis 3:19) That’s how the story begins – Creation, the Garden, the test, failure and judgment. It is a story from ancient time stemming from the deep human © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 7   intuition that God is the Creative Source of all that is, that creation is good and yet there is misery. Why? Human hubris? How will the Creator respond? A sentence of death – Dust thou art; to dust thou shalt return. Is there then no hope? Yes, there is for God has called a people to reverse the judgment; finally Grace will prevail. Such a story! And it goes on. From that people God called emerges one, Jesus of Nazareth. Those who encountered him sensed they were in the presence of God. Offensive to established authority, he was crucified. Yet amazingly, those who knew and loved him experienced his presence; He is risen, they cried! Such a story! Such a drama! And in the midst of it all was the urgent human question: Dust and nothing more? The Hebrew sage wondered. The Ecclesiastes writing from his pen articulates his wonderings, his questions. In the wake of Jesus, St. Paul who had a blinding encounter with light and a vision and voice of the risen Jesus thought he knew where he was in the divine drama of creation’s history. He was at the edge; the end was near. Death conquered in Jesus – the first fruits –would soon be universally defeated. Jesus enthroned in Heaven was engaged in a “mopping up” operation. The last enemy to be defeated was death and then all would be handed to God who would be “all in all.” Such a story! Such a drama! There was concrete history here. Jesus was an historical figure. He was crucified. But then all of that was mixed with Israel’s history, the prophetic expectation, the vision and hope of that people. But to separate fact and faith interpretation is quite impossible. It all became a Story – the Story of the emerging Jesus-Jewish movement and eventually of the Gentile Christian Church. The Hebrew writer wondered about what happened to the human spirit. St. Paul “knew,”…If the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” But, of course, he was wrong about history’s time-table. Maybe he was speaking words of faith, of trust, but not words to be taken literally. He was wrong too, I believe, about death being the last enemy. That view stemmed from the old Genesis myth of the “Fall” and, again those solemn words, “…to dust thou shalt return”. But whether he had it right or not isn’t really the point. Rather, he was combining all that his religious tradition had given him, in which his spiritual formation took place, and his own personal experience, and out of all that he created a story. And that story is a drama of life and death, of the source and ground and goal of our existence – issues of meaning, issues of ultimate questions. © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 8   Now go back to the Kennedy funeral – all of that was there – the biblical story – all of it. But it was woven into a tapestry, it was acted out as a drama, it pointed to that dimension of our existence that transcends the earthly, the rational, the empirical realm. And so it touches our depths, plays on our hopes, assuages our grief – offers assurance of Grace in the end. It is claimed by many that our biblical story no longer fits the facts – that is, our present knowledge of our cosmic reality as it is emerging and our understanding growing. Quite true! Not perfection/fall/redemption ending in the Apolcalypse vividly portrayed in the final New Testament writing. Rather an emerging, evolving, expanding cosmic reality whose mysteries are being unlocked more and more. Those who wrestle with these things suggest we need a new story – “a likely story” because it will combine what we know with what we can only wonder about. And that is because finally there is Mystery: Mystery not about to be unraveled, “solved,” but Ultimate Mystery that will, I suspect, remain forever in a “cloud of unknowing.” Come back once more to the two worship traditions – the ongoing Catholic tradition with its story wrapped in incense amidst flickering candles surrounding the body and blood of the Eucharistic sacrifice, and the 16th century emergent catechetical preaching of the Bible in rational discourse developed logically appealing to the intellect. Overdrawn? Perhaps, but also a profound insight into the parting of the ways symbolized by All Saints’ Day and Reformation Day. I have no doubt what I choose. Thank God for that moment of clarity when the difference was pointed out as a difference of appealing to the head or to the whole person. Thank God, recognizing the Bible as story and thus allowing it to come alive in a drama, a pageant, did not mean abandoning the mind. But it did create a setting of sensitive, artistic expression that elevated the soul through aesthetic experience, that opened the mind and warmed the heart, readying the worshiping community to be moved in the depths and discover faith, hope and love in the presence of the Sacred Mystery whose presence was pointed to in song and dance, cross and candle, table and font. Thank God we have shared memories of shared experience of being lost in wonder, love and praise. Yes, we miss it terribly, but we could not miss it had we not had such rich experience of celebrative worship in which head and heart were united in lifting us into the presence of that Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being. PRAYER O God, to You we lift our souls, to You we lift our hearts. © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page 9   The Psalmist wrote of the deer panting for streams of living water and saw himself mirrored in that thirst. We, too, thirst for You, O Living God, to know that You are; to sense Your presence; to rest in Your grace. As your people gathered here in this place, we would be still and know that You are God. We bring our thanksgiving in the conscious knowledge that all is grace The order of creation – we reset our clocks and watches to catch a bit more light in the morning, but Brother Sun and Sister Moon are affected not at all; Summer and Winter, Springtime and Harvest in passing parade proclaim Your great faithfulness. You are a God we can count on, keeping this vast cosmos balanced on a razor’s edge, just so, just right. And we breathe; planets move in marvelous symphony; salmon swim upstream; birds migrate to warmer climes; trees, so recently so richly garbed now poke heavenward bony fingers, warning of winter storms gathering, their leafy coats of dazzling color now lying shredded on the ground. And we sense a certain melancholy, a gentle grieving, for once again we are rushing headlong toward the end of another year. Like sand streaming through our fingers is the passing of our lives, and we seem paralyzed, failing to grasp it. Where have the years of our lives gone, O God, where have they gone? And what will become of us? Ah, Dear God, Creator, Lover of this world © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem in all the wonder of its diversity, there is no shadow of turning in You. You, the eternal God, from Whom we have life, to Whom our life returns, in You we trust, in You we rest. All is grace. We give You thanks through Jesus Christ, our Lord. For these moments, let us quiet our minds, letting go of concerns that burden us, regrets that cripple us, fears that paralyze us, whatever is troubling us. Let us image that which causes gratitude to rise in us – the gift and grace of life; the sources of our joy; those persons who make life rich. Let us call to mind those images which have shaped us – the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; the Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid? Come unto me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Since God is for us, who can be against us? neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. All will be well, all will be well, All manner of things will be well. O God, those words rise from our depths so naturally. O God it seems that, in moments like these when we purposefully, intentionally turn to you when we turn to whomever or whatever you are, we do so almost with a sigh, O God, © Grand Valley State University Page10   �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page11   for we know we are now in the zone of Mystery. There was something about Jesus when he prayed that caused the disciples to plead, Lord, teach us to pray. we plead, as well, O, God, teach us to pray. Once, perhaps, we came as suppliants to the Royal Throne of the Universe with requests we must admit on reflection were very self-centered, reflecting a very small universe in which our hopes and fears loomed very large. And still there are moments when we flee into your presence totally occupied with our own concerns – something that threatens us, or some experience that crushes us, or some potential happening that involves us in a loss we fear would undo us. And sometimes it is sheer joy, ecstasy, exhilaration that bursts forth in a torrent of praise, shutting out everything else for the moment. But, more and more, we look not out there, but somehow within, into our own depths, sensing we are connected deep down, rooted in Being itself, you being the inexhaustible Source and Ground of all that exists – the good earth, the starry heavens, the oceans’ tides And ourselves, conscious, aware, groping for some clue by which to know you, to rest in you, no longer strangers, but at home in the universe, at one with all that is. Sacred Mystery of Being, of our lives, it is so good, so familiar for us gathered here to be gathered consciously in Your presence. Such rich memories we share of days gone by. O God, how grateful we are for all we have shared, for all we have experienced together – grateful for friendship, for mutual trust, mutual caring, support and love. On this All Saints’ Day we remember those we’ve loved and lost awhile. We are grateful, O God, for the confidence with which we live and die, © Grand Valley State University �Symbol and Ritual Richard A. Rhem Page12   that to live is to live unto the Lord and to die is to die unto the Lord and therefore whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. We are grateful, O great Mystery of life, that we have been graced with a fundamental trust that this cosmic dance into which our lives are woven is not a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, but a universe whose grain is love, whose end is life and light, a cosmos exploding before our eyes with marvels our forbears would not believe and we can hardly begin to comprehend. O God Our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Grant us joy and peace as in You we live and move and have our being, confident we will never walk alone. Amen © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Sunday Social Gathering, All Saints Day Series Symbol and Ritual Scripture Text Ecclesiastes 3:1-23, II Cor. 4:16-5, 5:1, I Cor. 15:20 Location The location of the interview Grand Haven Community Center Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20091101 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-11-01 Title A name given to the resource Healing the Heart as We Say Goodbye in the Presence of Mystery Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on November 1, 2009 entitled "Healing the Heart as We Say Goodbye in the Presence of Mystery", as part of the series "Symbol and Ritual", on the occasion of Sunday Social Gathering, All Saints Day, at Grand Haven Community Center. Scripture references: Ecclesiastes 3:1-23, II Cor. 4:16-5, 5:1, I Cor. 15:20. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bc5a61ec9d6088fc3f475aee620b1669.pdf 2137dbaf0b4a677585c3ef4e18e9ac60 PDF Text Text Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust, Mother’s Place Ganges, Michigan September 13, 2009 Today is my last presentation for the 2009 season – my fifth this summer – and I want to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to Tapas and the community that gathers here for the privilege I have been afforded in my retirement to continue to reflect and write and present on subjects that catch my attention and interest – subjects I think are critical for our consideration as we continue to wonder about our human existence and what we are being called to be in this age of Radical Evolution. Radical Evolution – that is the title of the book by Joel Garreau about which I spoke last time. I can usually discern whether I did well or not by Nancy’s response. I think the grade last month was C+ plus grace. As she told me, “The folks that come, come for an ‘emotional fix’ from you.” She did not add the obvious – and you aimed at their heads and missed! That isn’t a new problem for me. Most of my ministry I have been tolerated because my people sort of liked me and put up with me even though I apparently shot over their heads with regularity. But I am not really penitent because I am convinced that the things with which I deal are of critical importance for our human being. I do, however, recognize the necessity of making that with which we deal touch the heart as well as the head. And so let me attempt to portray our human situation in the context of where we have emerged and suggest that the only hope for a human and humane future lies in the love of God which we find incarnate in Jesus. Let me be clear. I speak as a Christian. I speak as a Christian who loves his faith tradition, who loves and, with his whole being, would follow Jesus. But I speak not in an exclusivistic sense that Jesus is the only exemplar of the Love which is our only hope. Jesus is my window to God, not the only window to God. I learned that so powerfully one day at the magnificent cathedral at Chartres outside Paris. I led a tour group of a couple dozen and I had been told that an Englishman named Malcomb Miller had lived in the shadow of the cathedral for years and gave a fascinating lecture and tour of the cathedral. We arranged for our group to meet him and his lecture was as good as I had been told. We gathered in the nave. Beautiful stained glass windows were brilliant in the © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University   �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 2   morning sunshine. Our guide told us something I had never realized – the windows were created to reflect biblical characters and biblical narratives – that was obvious, but then he said, the cathedral was like a town library before the printing press. Here the people were taught the biblical story in visual images. We were then taken through the great cathedral, Malcomb Miller knowing, it seemed, every stone and carving in that high expanse of sacred space – the transcepts, the choir, the chancel, the magnificent Rose Window over the altar. At some point it came to me as a parable. I imagined all the great religious traditions – each religious group gathered before one of the great windows, the window telling its story in stained glass – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Native Peoples – some in the Nave, some in the Transcepts, some in the Choir, the Chancel – each group focused on a particular story – not contradictory stories but complementary stories. And then – as a burst of light – I thought – different stories, but all illuminated by One Light. I had been probing this whole question. To be sure, I was ready for such an answer but the cathedral image provided me with a story that focused for me the whole question of the universality of the religious quest and the recognition that in each of the great religious traditions there was a common purpose – that the respective stories of the human family address ultimate questions of our beginnings, our endings, and the meaning of the human adventure and how we should then live. In sum, I was and am convinced that in all the great religions there is the mediation of truth and grace to live and die by. It seems so obvious to me at this point in my life. After that excursus, if I speak of the biblical story and the Love of God that came to expression in Jesus, you will hear me speaking of a particular expression or story in the context of a universal quest. Last month I spoke of the heady and harrowing place we humans have come at present with the knowledge and techniques we possess – the information explosion with the Internet, robotics, genetics, and nanotechnology, creating amazing, incredible potential for good or ill. All of that was a bit technical perhaps even though what Garreau was portraying as the radical evolution we are engaged with has very practical implications and ramifications: Where does our future lie? Will our further progress lead us to a heavenly world or a hellish world? Or will we just keep on muddling through – will we prevail? But there is a bigger picture that I want to paint today, to set, as it were, the present moment and crisis in a cosmic context. In the biblical story, “in the beginning” God calls creation into existence from nothing. Then ensues the story of the temptation and fall of the human being. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 3   For the rest, the biblical story is a story of human sin and divine grace, God providing redemption leading to the original purpose of God – the creation of a new heaven and earth and the Shalom of God emerging, the darkness being banished. That story – and it is a story which our ancestors told to make sense of the human situation as they experienced it – that story reflected some profound understanding of the human, historical situation – The cosmos does not ground itself but is grounded in that which calls it into being. And the human being is in the image of God, always before the decision to choose wisely or destructively – and it is universally true that humans fail in the test. Human test, human failure, human guilt, and human hope for redemption. Somehow that is all involved in those early Genesis stories or myths. But that story of beginning and human unfolding, while still appreciated for what was being wrestled with, no longer can be our story because our knowledge and understanding of the cosmos, of the evolutionary unfolding of the cosmic reality – the movement from Big Bang to the present – tells us an amazing tale that makes the Genesis account pale in comparison. It is a mind-boggling account that has only been available to us for a little over a century. In Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution, which portrays for us where we are in terms of what is presently within human capacity, he makes an obvious statement, but a statement that should give us pause as religious people with our respective stories. Garreau declares, “Right now the stories we tell do not match the facts.” (p. 264) One of the truly great and visionary thinkers, who as a scientist had penetrating knowledge of and insight into the natural order and who simultaneously was concerned to relate that knowledge to his Christian faith understanding, was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A leading paleontologist whose scientific credentials were unquestioned, he was also a devout Roman Catholic belonging to the Jesuit Society. In his most important work, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard created a new story, a story based on the best scientific knowledge, an amazing intuitive gift of imagination and a profound faith in God as Source, Ground and Goal of the unfolding cosmic process. In a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, his teaching as it came to expression in his posthumously published magnum opus is summarized: …Teilhard writes of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 4   and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is “pulling” all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way. To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole-universe (see Gaia theory). Such theories are generally termed teleological views of evolution. Teilhard attempts to make sense of the universe by its evolutionary process. He interprets mankind as the axis of evolution into higher consciousness, and postulates that a supreme consciousness, God, must be drawing the universe towards him… Teilhard studied what he called the rise of spirit, or evolution of consciousness, in the universe. He believed it to be observable and verifiable in a simple law he called the Law of Complexity/Consciousness. This law simply states that there is an inherent compulsion in matter to arrange itself in more complex groupings, exhibiting higher levels of consciousness. The more complex the matter, the more conscious it is. Teilhard proposed that this is a better way to describe the evolution of life on earth, rather than Herbert Spencer’s “survival of the fittest.” The universe, he argued, strives towards higher consciousness, and does so by arranging itself into more complex structures. Teilhard identified what he termed to be different stages in the rise of consciousness. These stages are analogous to what are termed the geosphere and the biosphere. The Law of Complexity/Consciousness traces matter’s path through these stages, as it ‘complexifies’ upon itself and rises in consciousness. Teilhard claimed that, although it is not evident, consciousness (in an extremely limited degree) exists even in rocks, as the Law of Complexity/Consciousness implies. In plants, matter is complex enough to exhibit a consciousness that is the very life of the plant. In animals, matter is conscious enough to an extraordinary degree to where consciousness shows itself in a wide range of reactionary movement to the whole universe. However, Teilhard here proposed another level of consciousness, to which human beings belong, because of their cognitive ability; i.e. their ability to ‘think’. Human beings, Teilhard argued, represent the layer of consciousness which has “folded back in upon itself”, and has become self-conscious. Julian Huxley, Teilhard’s scientific colleague, described it like this: “evolution is nothing but matter become conscious of itself.” © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 5   So, in addition to the geosphere and the biosphere, Teilhard posited another sphere, which is the realm of human beings, the realm of reflective thought: the noosphere. In the noosphere Teilhard believed the same Law of Complexity/Consciousness to be at work, although not in a way previously seen. He argued that, ever since human beings first came into existence 200,000 years ago, the Law of Complexity/Consciousness began to run on a different (higher) plane. Consciousness in the universe, he argued, now continues to rise in the complex arrangement and unification (Teilhard sometimes called it ‘totalization’ of mankind on earth.) As human beings converge around the earth, he reasoned, unifying themselves in ever more complex forms of arrangement, consciousness will rise. Finally, the keystone to his phenomenology is that, because Teilhard could not explain why the universe would move in the direction of more complex arrangements and higher consciousness, he postulated that there must exist ahead of the moving universe, and pulling it along, a higher pole of supreme consciousness, which he called Omega Point. This is an amazing vision. An evolving, emerging cosmic reality from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings with conscious awareness, an envelope of mind/intelligence/consciousness being “pulled” toward the Omega Point. He believed evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way. “To Teilhard, evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and whole universe”– and God is drawing the universe toward Him. Now there is a new story. It is a story as Genesis is a story, but there is this difference. Genesis is an ancient story of an ancient people asking deeply human questions and the story reflects some deep truths or experiences which the writer brought to expression. Teilhard, too, composed a story reflective of a deep faith in God – Creator/Source/Ground and Goal of the whole process, but his story takes account of all available knowledge of our cosmic journey as the secrets of the universe have been laid bare through scientific investigation. The hard evidence of science is gathered and the grand evolutionary movement of reality is analyzed. But, of course, that evidence cannot answer the question of the mystery of beginnings nor the mystery of the end. There the believing man expresses his faith that this cosmic dance is not an accident, or simply a random unfolding of a meaningless cosmic phenomenon along whose unfolding has appeared life, consciousness, and the human being who – as Garreau suggests – is seizing the keys of creation and beginning to determine its future course. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 6   I must say I was enthralled with Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man. Written in 1938, he was anticipating the very kinds of developments Garreau tells us in his Radical Evolution are now within our reach. The work was not published until 1955 because Teilhard was forbidden by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to publish his work during his life and, being obedient to his Jesuit vows of obedience, he did not. Posthumously his manuscripts were published and it is amazing how far-seeing was his vision before the actual scientific data was known. Over fifty years after Teilhard’s grand imaginative story, Gordon Kaufman, Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, wrote In Face of Mystery (1993) and as I revisit that study I am amazed that what Kaufman reflects on was already envisioned by Teilhard. Kaufman writes, …the traditional notion that God works through all of cosmic history – and is working in human history in particular toward the creation of a thoroughly humane order (that is, toward human salvation) – now becomes understood in terms of the modern notion of the evolutionaryhistorical process within which humanity has emerged and developed: the serendipitous creativity underlying and working through all reality is expressing itself here (over many aeons of time) in a trajectory toward human and humane orders of being. In a slow, long-term development of this sort the direction in which things are moving may, of course, remain unclear for a very long time. Not until a stage of considerable differentiation and specification has been reached is it possible to imagine, or make judgments about, what is really happening; and even then many quite diverse possibilities remain open. But each new stage of the ongoing biohistorical process specifies a bit more precisely what directions the movement is going and what outcomes may be expected, as some possibilities are cut off and eliminated, and others are opened up and increasingly realized; and there may come a moment of decisive “revelation” of what is going on in the process as a whole. Thus, for example, at the moment of cosmic time in which the earth was gradually cooling and solidifying from the ball of fire it had earlier been, there would have been no way to anticipate or predict that in due course it would become a womb and home for living creatures. Later on, when living organisms began to appear in the sea, it would hardly have been possible to guess that they would eventually evolve into myriads of species of life – birds, insects, animals, plants with infinite varieties of flowers and fruits, and so on. Even with the appearance of mammals it could hardly have been suspected that anthropoids would appear further down the road. And with the emergence of fully formed Homo there was © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 7   still no sufficient basis to foresee the development of ancient Egypt, Babylon, India, China, Greece, or Rome – and certainly not the various forms of modern civilization. However, if from the vantage point of modern humanity we look back over this long cumulation of events, we may begin to discern what appears to be a more or less continuous line of development up to the present. It is striking to realize that this line was not visible until the last half of the nineteenth century; before that (even one hundred years earlier), it could not be seen at all. It seems, thus, that with a trajectory of this sort what is going on is by no means evident at all points along the way; the events which give it its distinct character and significance become determinate only in the course of the process itself. Only as certain crucial thresholds were crossed did new possibilities appear and in due course become realized; and only after many such decisive thresholds were crossed did beings appear with a vantage point enabling them to see that it was possible to interpret this whole development as somehow implicit from the beginning. One speaks of a “process of development” when one can specify certain points or stages through which a particular trajectory has proceeded, the process as a whole being marked off and defined by some (at least implicit) beginning and end. “End” and “beginning” and “process of development” are thus all logically interconnected with one another; they illuminate and determine one another conceptually, and no one of them can be clearly understood – as the “end” or the “beginning” of “this particular process” – without the others. Because of these conceptual interconnections we are inclined to think of the end of a particular process of development as implicit from its beginning; and if it happens to be the process of our own development into humanness that we are considering, it will be of importance to us to attempt to see, on the basis of the direction it seems to have followed up to the point at which we humans now find ourselves, where it may be going. (p. 386f) Where are we going? That is the critical question and to what degree will we move the process toward the realization of a humane community of love and experience union and communion with God – the vision that captivated Teilhard? On Friday we remembered 9/11. That date has been imprinted indelibly on our minds and hearts. A writer who for twenty years wrote science musings for the Boston Globe, Chet Raymo, wrote a piece in the wake of that horrendous event. He entitled it “The Problem of Good,” and after beautifully describing a celestial scene as he gazed upon the heavens, he raises the question in the third paragraph: “Why must human violence disturb nature’s peace? But on second thought he writes, © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 8   …But, of course, I had it exactly backwards. It is nature that is violent. Astronomers point out how few places in the universe are sufficiently calm for life to exist. Massive black holes at the centers of galaxies gobble gas and stars. In the arms of galaxies, suns explode with a violence that shatters surrounding worlds. Comets and asteroids smash into planets. Galaxies collide… We now understand that violence and death are corollaries of life. To persist, living creatures must take matter and energy from their environment. As life proliferates, competition for resources becomes inevitable. Aggression is advantageous, even necessary. Genetic variations that confer a competitive advantage are favored in the struggle to survive. If nature were not cruel, conscious creatures such as ourselves would never have evolved. It is as Loren Eisely wrote: “Instability lies at the heart of the world.” The criminals who wreaked havoc on New York and Washington were acting out an ancient biological script. Yet there is ground for hope. Our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness. Our genes may predispose us to act in certain ways, good or bad, but they do not constrain us. We are effectively free to choose good over evil. Humans alone, of all the things we know about in the universe, can escape the bipolar logic of evolution. To a cheering extent we have done so. As Margaret Meade pointed out, the circle of those whom we do not kill has steadily expanded throughout human history. The optimists among us imagine that the circle will ultimately embrace the entire planet. From nature’s point of view, there is no such thing as the Problem of Evil: order and disorder, life and death, cooperation and competition are the twin principles of nature’s creative force. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace. “The Problem of Good.” I was struck by that phrase. I don’t think I had ever run into it; I had never heard it spoken – the problem of good. I have heard a lot about the problem of evil, of course. The problem of evil is a constant focus of attention for our time. The problem of evil is portrayed for us and documented for us 24-7, with the ceaseless coverage of the world by the cable news networks. We are constantly facing the evil and the tragedy in the world. But what about the good? As Chet Raymo suggests, evil, violence and war are not © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page 9   the whole story. There are signs of growing humanization. The problem of good is “to create on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace.” In two places in the New Testament occurs a brief statement I have come to greatly value. The statement is, No one has ever seen God… It occurs in John 1:1-18 and I John 4:12. The consensus of scholarship locates the origin of both the Gospel of John and the Epistles of John in Ephesus, The Gospel, the earlier document dated in the 90’s of the first century. The Epistles are usually assigned a date around 100 C.E. This is only of interest to us because this means the Jesus Movement that was becoming the Christian church had, by the time of these writings, three generations of believers and enough time for questions and conflicts to arise. Coming to these statements from my own faith understanding, I see the statement “No one has ever seen God” as an acknowledgement of Mystery. Interestingly, The Gospel begins, In the beginning was the Word…. Word in the Greek language being Logos, the term used to express reason. So we are dealing with the subject of the revelation of God who can only be spoken of mythologically, but the Christian myth here being described claims to be about the Logos: myths about Logos as it were! Of course, my claim will be challenged because Jesus was a concrete figure of history and the writer claims precisely that the Logos was enfleshed in the human, Jesus of Nazareth. This is exactly the claim the writer makes after the acknowledgement that no one has ever seen God. He goes on: It is God the only Son…who has made him known. This is the explicit claim of the central Christian claim of Incarnation: The Word became flesh! The mystery of the God no one has ever seen has now a “face” and therein lies the clue to the mystery of God. Jesus is the epiphany (manifestation) of God. The First Epistle of John has as its central thrust the Incarnation as well. Its opening words make that clear: © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page10   We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life. But I am fascinated by what I judge to be a further development of the idea of incarnation. In the First Epistle, following “No one has ever seen God,” we read: If we love one another God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. A bit later, the writer underscores that claim: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. (vs. 16) Has not the author of the Epistle expanded on the idea of Incarnation? Now it is not only the luminosity of the divine enfleshment in Jesus as the locus of revelation; rather what came to expression in Jesus has expanded to the community of love. In sum, the Johannine Community believed God is love, a love that found concretion in the human being, Jesus, as the revelation of the mystery of love, a revelation that came to expression in the life of Jesus of Nazareth or, as I like to express it – in The Way of Jesus. (Just a reminder of where we began – for the Christian community Jesus is a window into the mystery, but not exclusively so.) Teilhard had a grand vision – the evolution of the cosmos– in which has emerged, after 13.7 billion years, a human being with self-consciousness and intelligence, an evolutionary reality grounded in a Creator and being “pulled” into the future toward the Omega Point – the total unification of personalized reality in God. Gordon Kaufman remarks that, in agreement with Teilhard, there is no reason to assume the evolutionary process has reached its end; the process continues. Chet Raymo is shaken by human violence after 9/11, but on deeper reflection sees the violent course of the cosmic evolutionary drama but recognizes the issue before us is the problem of good. Kaufman asks where are we going? Raymo suggests the problem of good is to create “on this tiny planet an oasis of unalloyed peace.” Only love can create a global community of wellbeing. Only non-violent resistance to evil and tangible expression of love in action can save us. For us, it is not a problem of evil, it is a problem of good. It is a problem of finding a way to make the good predominate. It is a way with our consciousness whereby we can become self-aware and resist that native move to violent response. And, good grief, we have come a long way. We do care for the weak. We do recognize the call to compassion. We do care, not only for our own, but we © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page11   recognize the intrinsic value of humanness. We have come a long way. And yet, collectively, we still live in tribal culture. For us it is the problem of the good. There is no reality apart from the reality in which we are woven, and the reality into which we are woven is the externalization of the Infinite Mystery that is God, Spirit externalizing, Spirit incarnating, and that which is incarnate becoming conscious of Spirit so that that which becomes incarnate and conscious says, “I don’t have to go any longer in this native course, this natural course, this ordinary human kind of response. I can stop. I can become aware of myself. I can recognize that what is necessary is not to perpetuate the hell on earth, but at some point to stop it.” Jesus knew that. Jesus actively resisted the domination system of his day. Jesus was crucified because the old system will always rise up violently, because the old system believes that what is at stake is survival. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” They knew what they were doing. They were surviving. They were surviving, if need be, by violence. But, they didn’t ultimately, not in the long run, for violence begets violence… It is a self-creating universe and it is violent and it is brutal, and there is no one out there tweaking the system. But, that self-creating universe has come to the likes of you and me who have had a taste of decency, who know a thing or two about civility, who know that the intention of God that became human was an intention that that human might learn to love, for God is love, and the one who dwells in love dwells in God, and God dwells in that one. So that the Infinite Mystery that is love becomes concrete and tangible in that interrelationship of love, person to person. In that relationship of love, person to person, that native response to violence is undercut. It is possible to come to a point, if there were a critical mass living thus, that the world could be changed. There was a Trappist monk in Algeria, a Prior of the monastery there. Algeria has been one of those hot spots of Islamic fundamentalism conflicting with the government. Sensing the dangers around him, Dom Christian de Cherge, Prior of the Trappist monastery, had written a letter which was sealed and to be opened only in the case of his murder. Two years later, in 1996, seven Trappist monks were beheaded. The letter was opened on the day of Pentecost after the prior’s death. In the letter, de Cherge indicated that if he were killed, he didn’t want any reaction against Islam or a caricaturing of Islam. Committed as he was to interreligious dialogue, he indicated he had remained in Algeria as a fraternal presence. He concluded the letter by saying that some day he and his murderer would both meet in paradise before the God they both worshiped. So, a man anticipates a violent end and he writes a letter just in case, and when it happens, he says, “Please don’t retaliate. Please don’t damn the enemy. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Tell Me a Story Richard A. Rhem Page12   Because he’s not my enemy. He is my brother, and he who murders me will stand with me one day in the presence of God.” Now, you figure that one out and you will have the formula for quite a different world. Some years ago there was a film that moved me greatly. It was called Places of the Heart. Perhaps you saw it. A rural Texas farmer is murdered. His widow is left with a crop to harvest. A black man comes through town looking for work. She hires him. She boards a blind man. Between them, they struggle and they harvest the crop and they save the farm, only to see the Ku Klux Klan move in and drive the black man away with their burning cross in the yard. And one’s heart sinks and one has to say, “That’s always the way it is!” But, the film then moves off into an ethereal future and there’s a church service in that little rural community. And there’s the man who was murdered and the man who murdered him. There’s the bully of the Ku Klux Klan and the black man and the widow and the blind man. And they pass the bread and the cup down the row with the words, “The peace of Christ be with you.” And at first I wondered if the filmmaker was mocking the communion of the church as though one thing goes on out there and then we come here as though it isn’t true, but I think, rather, since the passage that was read in the service was I Corinthians 13, he was saying, “Now – but then. Then, finally, love’s vulnerability will triumph over all of our selfishness and our self-centeredness and our failure to care, our violent ways that beget violence. Only love has the power to change us. Only love can create a cosmic future. Someday love will! References: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man, 1938, published 1955. Joel Garreau. Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What it Means to be Human. Broadway, 2006. Gordon D. Kaufman. In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology. Harvard University Press, 1995. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man, 1938, pubished 1955. Joel Garreau. Radical Evolution, 2006. Gordon Kaufman. In Face of Mystery, 1995. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090913 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-09-13 Title A name given to the resource Tell Me a Story Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on September 13, 2009 entitled "Tell Me a Story", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Cosmic Evolution Emergence Mystery https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/bf67a22aeb5639c1a65b13177dc8f20c.pdf 5ad0844f46282b4138011b50c861aa71 PDF Text Text The Promise and Peril of Being Human Psalm 8; Genesis 3:1-7; Revelation 21:1-4; 22-25; 22: 1-2; Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan August 9, 2009 Today is August 9, 2009. Do you know what happened on this day in 1945? Well, I would not have become aware of August 9, 1945, had not our gracious host, Tapas, responded to my email giving him my theme for today – “The Promise and Peril of Being Human.” He wrote, Interesting numerology. You speak on the perils and promise of human potential on August 9 at 11 am and August 9 1945, was Nagasaki Bombing day – mere coincidence, of course… Well, coincidence or not, I replied to Tapas that at least he had provided my introduction and I did check out the Wikipedia piece on the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9 – the first and only use of the atomic bomb bringing horrific devastation and great loss of human life and bringing Japan to surrender. I was sobered as I reviewed those days of terror and death, of devastation and the unleashing of atomic power into the world. Of that event, Einstein said famously, The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. Or, in another citation – The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. I am grateful that Tapas’ reference to August 9, 1945, put me on this track because it reminded me that the issue of human progress has always been accompanied by promise and peril. The splitting of the atom was obviously in a class by itself beyond any emergent and any evolution to that point, except the dawn of consciousness and the radical evolution on whose threshold we stand today in terms of the Information Revolution, Genetics, Robotics and Nanotechnology likewise far exceeds the consequences of any previous © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University   �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 2   breakthrough in human progress. Nonetheless, there is a long history of human progress which has been welcomed and resisted. In 2005 I immersed myself in this subject and gave a lecture entitled “The End of the Human Story.” As you may surmise, I was playing on the ambiguity of the word “End;” it can mean the point of termination – the game ended after midnight – or, it can mean the successful achievement of the purpose of an endeavor – as in, the project achieved its end of creating a new vision. Therein lies the ambiguity of my title: will the explosive expansion of technology lead to humanity’s demise – the end of the story? Or, might technology be the means whereby humanity realizes its divine intention, its purpose in process? Put another way: will technology lead us to the gates of Hell, the final conflagration, or usher us into Edenic bliss, the Garden of Paradise, the City of God? Lest I build too great expectations with such cosmic queries, let me say at the outset that both consequences are possible – coming to our end, or realizing our end, and which possibility will prevail I do not know. No one knows. But, the value of reflection on the theme “Human and Technology” is bringing to awareness what must be the critical issue confronting the human family – not simply what as yet undreamed-of possibilities there are for technological development, but rather, given whatever technological advances that emerge, how will humanity respond in terms of control, utilization and application? Technology is not a neutral instrument; it has and it will radically transform a cultural paradigm. Yet, at this moment in our cosmic journey, human decisionmaking can still determine whether technological development will spell our end or be a means of realizing the full blossoming of the human spirit – which would be simply Divine. It is in coming to a sharpened awareness of the critical nature of the choices that even now confront the human family that the value of our theme lies. As one whose whole life has been given over to contemplating the human before the Face of God, I must admit that I have been shocked into a new awareness of the real situation of our present existence, literally teetering between the end and the End – between extinction and the next stage of human development. Let me begin to address the subject by putting the issue of humanity and technology in an historical context. The tension between human values and technological development has a long history. Without attempting a full account of that history, let me simply point to what for me was new insight and understanding – the beloved Robin Hood of English legendary saga was not simply one who with his band of merry men took from the rich to aid the poor. In his Rebels Against the Future, Kirkpatrick Sale points out that the Robin Hood legends recount the struggle against the early English wool industry: © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 3   It is probable that one of the real figures at the center of the legend was the victim of an early industrial policy of the rising English monarchy to encourage a native wool industry by transforming some of the commonly held central forests into private grazing lands for sheep, and his troubles with the Sheriff of Nottingham no doubt stemmed from a clash between his desire to keep on using the woods for food and fuel, as his father and forefathers had before him, and the royal policy (proclaimed in 1217=18) of cutting them down for pasturage. This conflict between old and new, custom and commerce, was dramatic enough to fix itself in the stories of the locals, take life in several early narrative poems (most effectively in the Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode of 1495), and eventually be resurrected by several early 19th-century Romantic novelists (notably Scott, in Ivanhoe), from where it passes into modern films and fables…. But for all the enduring resonance of this tale, in historical fact it was the royal policy of clear-cutting and wool manufacturing over the forest commons that prevailed. The heartland forests were enclosed and harvested, laid bare for grazing, and within a few centuries nothing much was left of either the great Barsdale or Sherwood forests but a few scattered clusters of conifers and a few stately oaks in tracts deemed unsuitable for development; wool weaving became the key industry of England and woolen cloth for centuries its most important export, an enterprise nurtured and protected by a succession of kings and parliaments down to the 19th century. Robin Hood’s name may have lasted, and a legend about heroic commoners resisting the noble and the powerful may have become burnished by time, but in truth it was not the practice of robbing from the rich, nor the benefaction of the poor, that became the principle means of enterprise in middle England. (p. 2f) Sale recounts the Robin Hood legend of the 13th and 14th centuries to introduce his history of the Luddites who are his “Rebels” whom he uses to address our contemporary crisis created by the present explosive technological advances. It is fitting, and perhaps not accidental, that this triangle of central Britain, seven centuries after it immortalized Robin Hood, was precisely the site of the risings of the Luddites. The Luddites – many of them weavers and combers and dressers of wool, but many of them artisans in the cotton trades that became increasingly important at the end of the 18th century – were, like Robin’s Merry Men, victims of progress, or what was held to be progress. Having for centuries worked out of their cottages and small village shops on machines that, though far from simple, could be managed by a single person, assisted perhaps by children, they suddenly saw new, complex, large-scale machines coming into their settled trades, or threatening to, usually housed in the huge multistory buildings rising in their ancient valleys. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 4   Worse still, they saw their ordered society of craft and custom and community begin to give way to an intruding industrial society and its new technologies and systems, new principles of merchandise and markets, new configurations of countryside and city, beyond their ken or control. And when they rose up against this, for fifteen tempestuous months at the start of the second decade of the 19th century, they did so with more ferocity and intensity than anything Robin Hood ever mustered, and were put down with far more force than anything King John ever commanded. The Luddites took their name from a mythical Ned Ludd – whose origins are still obscure… – but they were conscious throughout that they were traveling on ground trod by an earlier set of courageous troublemakers; one of the earliest Luddite letters was posted from “Robin Hood’s Cave,” another was said to have come from “Ned Ludd’s office, Sherwood Forest,”… ( p. 3) Sale writes of the critical nature of the Luddite rebellion as the Industrial Revolution was transforming English life. The response of the English establishment threatened to betray the very character of the nation, sensing as they did that the whole future of industrialization was at stake. Sale writes, … the various Luddite armies that operated in 1811 and 1812 were so carefully organized and disciplined and so effective in their attacks, causing damage to machines and property that amounted to more than £100,000 that they seemed a strong and highly threatening movement of a kind Britain had not known before – of “a character of daring and ferocity,’ the Annual Register for 1812 said, “unprecedented among the lower classes in this country.” Then, too, they had enough popular support in the manufacturing districts to be able to carry on their secret, illegal activities for months on end without being betrayed, despite official bribes and threats, nighttime arrests, and interrogations, suggesting to certain minds at least that they were only the most visible part of a very widespread insurrectionary – possibly revolutionary – tendency in the land…. Last and perhaps most important, the Luddites were understood to represent not merely a threat to order, as riotous mobs or revolutionary plotters of the past, but, in some way not always articulated, to industrial progress itself. They were rebels of a unique kind, rebels against the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy then taking hold in Britain, in which it was argued that those who controlled capital were able to do almost anything they wished, encouraged and protected by government and king, without much in the way of laws or ethics or customs to restrain them. The real challenge of the Luddites was not so much the physical one, against the machines and manufacturers, but a moral one, calling into question on grounds of justice and fairness the © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 5   underlying assumptions of this political economy and the legitimacy of the principles of unrestrained profit and competition and innovation at its heart. Which is why the architects and beneficiaries of the new industrialism knew that it was imperative to subdue that challenge, to try to deny and expunge its premises of ancient rights and traditional mores, if the labor force were to be made sufficiently malleable, and the new terms of employment sufficiently fixed, to allow what we now call the Industrial Revolution to triumph unimpeded. (p. 4f) The impact and implications of the Industrial Revolution were creating serious questions and deep foreboding in the minds and hearts of many of the thoughtful and reflective English folk of that time. Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin (living with but as yet not married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley), Shelley, his friend Lord Byron and Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, spent the summer of 1816 in Switzerland, a summer of perpetual rain. Creating their own entertainment, they decided to see who could write the most frightening ghost story. Mary Shelley was 18 when she began to write her story and 21 when the book was published under the title Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (18118). The numerous film versions of the story are in the horror film genre and mask Shelley’s real intention in the novel. The name Frankenstein has been switched to the Monster in the dramatic versions of stage and film whereas, in the novel, Victor Frankenstein is the student experimenter fascinated with the power of electricity in lightning. He determines to pursue the secret of life. The reference in the title to Prometheus reveals what was on Shelley’s mind as she wrote – a modern Prometheus, not thief of fire, but attempting to become the Creator. Patricia A. Neal, in an essay entitled “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Myth for Modern Man,” stresses the serious intention of the author about concerns which continue very much with us as we wrestle with the tension between human values and the explosive technological advances we are witnessing. Neal writes, The power of the myth of an unattended scientific creation, left to destroy innocent lives, assumes importance in the final decade of the twentieth century. The book questions the morality of Frankenstein’s actions. Did he have a right to create and abandon the creature? In her novel, Mary Shelley anticipated the problem of a destructive force created by man, a force with no genuine means of control. Kirkpatrick Sale likewise recognizes Shelley’s serious purpose in the writing of her myth – …Mary Shelley’s prescient tale of techno-madness, Frankenstein, published in 1818, was so vivid a message of the dangers of mechanization and the problems of scientific invention – “You are my creator,” the © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 6   monster tells the scientist at the end, “but I am your master” – that it has survived to today, unforgettable…. Thus the recognition of the potential and peril of scientific knowledge and technological development has a long history, but the pace and peril of that development is increasing in our day, not gradually, but exponentially, creating, according to Kirkpatrick Sale, more passion and urgency than at any time in the past two centuries. This is the subject of a fascinating book by Joel Garreau, a journalist with The Washington Post, entitled Radical Evolution, the sub-title being “The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means To Be Human.” A reviewer says of the author “…he’s neither a technology booster nor a Luddite. The questions his moral quandaries raise are among the deepest questions we know how to ask: What kind of creatures are we – the apelike animals from which we evolved, or the angels we imagine we can become?” Author Kevin Kelly writes, It isn’t often an author gets to herald the biggest news in the last 10,000 years. But you’ll get the full, uncensored, mind-blowing report here in this entertaining and surprisingly deep book. Meet soldiers who don’t sleep, animals controlled with joy sticks, computers controlled by merely thinking, the blind driving cars, and parents designing their kids – and that is just what is happening right now. Veteran scout Joel Garreau prepares ordinary readers for the ultimate question of this century: Who do you think we should be? He makes it clear that as of today, human nature is now under the control of humans, and we are doing something about it – but we aren’t aware of it. To guide you through this boggle Garreau offers astonishments, conundrums, and sanity. I cite Kelly because he points to what most of us, the uninitiated, might write off as far-out science fiction but is present day reality in the advanced laboratories of our most elite research universities and agencies. Garreau declares we are at an inflection point in history. The dictionary defines inflection as 1) “The act of turning from a direct line, or the condition of being so turned,” 2) “A turn, bend, or curve,”…5) “A change of a curve or arc from convex to concave or the reverse.” This is how Garreau describes it: We are at an inflection point in history. For all previous millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment. Starting with fire and clothes, we looked for ways to ward off the elements. With the development of agriculture we controlled our food supply. In cities we sought safety. Telephones and airplanes collapsed distance. Antibiotics kept death-dealing microbes at bay. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 7   Now, however, we have started a wholesale process of aiming our technologies inward. Now our technologies have started to merge with our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny and perhaps our souls. Serious people have embarked on changing humans so much that they call it a new kind of engineered evolution – one that we direct for ourselves. “The next frontier,” says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, “is our own selves.” The people you will meet in Radical Evolution are testing these fundamental hypotheses: We are riding a curve of exponential change. This change is unprecedented in human history. It is transforming no less than human nature. This isn’t fiction. You can see the outlines of this reality in the headlines now. You’re going to see a lot more of it in just the next few years – certainly within your prospective lifetime. We have been attempting to transcend the limits of human nature for a very long time. We’ve tried Socratic reasoning and Buddhist enlightenment and Christian sanctification and Cartesian logic and the New Soviet Man. Our successes have ranged from mixed to limited, at best. Nonetheless, we are pressing forward, attempting once again to improve not just our world but our very selves. Who knows? Maybe this time we’ll get it right. (p. 6) This isn’t fiction; it is that which I want to stress. Garreau is not into sensationalism; he is not writing to scare, nor is he simply wanting to sell books. He is a serious writer writing about the most profound questions facing the human community. Neither is this a book about technology per se. It would not be on my reading list if it were. I am technologically challenged but I do sport a titanium hip, I use a cell phone sparingly and I am able to utilize about five per cent of the capacity of my computer to work the wonders of cyberspace. I mention this because I don’t want you to think you are in for a lecture on the intricacies of the latest technological developments. What I do hope to do is make you aware that technology has advanced to the point where most people now living will be faced with real existential questions about how they will live their lives and maybe not as much their lives but the lives of their children and grandchildren. Garreau opens this up with a simple question parents might ask their son or daughter returning from their university – “What are your classmates like, honey?” The answer reveals some of the ways humans will be able to be enhanced given the technology now available or in process of being perfected: How does she explain what the enhanced kids are like? She wonders. She knows her dear old parents have read in their newsmagazines about some © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 8   of what’s available. But actually dealing with some of her new classmates is decidedly strange. •They have amazing thinking abilities. They’re not only faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever met, but faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever imagined. •They have photographic memories and total recall. They can devour books in minutes. •They’re beautiful, physically. Although they don’t put much of a premium on exercise, their bodies are remarkably ripped. •They talk casually about living a very long time, perhaps being immortal. They’re always discussing their “next lives.” One fellow mentions how, after he makes his pile as a lawyer, he plans to be a glassblower, after which he wants to become a nanosurgeon. •One of her new friends fell while jogging, opening up a nasty gash on her knee. Your daughter freaked, ready to rush her to the hospital. But her friend just stared at the gaping wound, focusing her mind on it. Within minutes, it simply stopped bleeding. •This same friend has been vaccinated against pain. She never feels acute pain for long. These new friends are always connected to each other, sharing their thoughts no matter how far apart, with no apparent gear. They call it “silent messaging.” It almost seems like telepathy. They have this odd habit of cocking their head in a certain way whenever they want to access information they don’t yet have in their own skulls – as if waiting for a delivery to arrive wirelessly. Which it does. For a week or more at a time, they don’t sleep. They joke about getting rid of the beds in their cramped dorm rooms, since they use them so rarely. Her new friends are polite when she can’t keep up with their conversations, as if she were handicapped. They can’t help but condescend to her, however, when she protests that embedded technology is not natural for humans. That’s what they call her – “Natural.” In fact, that’s what they call all those who could be like them but choose not to, the way vegetarians choose to abstain from meat. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page 9   They call themselves “Enhanced.” And those who have neither the education nor the money to even consider keeping up with enhancement technology? These they dismiss as simply “The Rest.” The poor dears – they just keep falling farther and farther behind. Everyone in your daughter’s law school takes it as a matter of course that the law they are studying is changing to match the new realities. The law will be upgraded. The Enhanced believe, just as they have new physical and mental upgrades installed every time they go home. The technology is moving that fast. In fact, the paper your daughter is working on over the holiday concerns whether a Natural can really enter into an informed-consent relationship with an Enhanced – even for something like a date. How would a Natural understand what makes an Enhanced tick if she doesn’t understand how he is augmented? The law is based on the Enlightenment principle that we hold a human nature in common. Increasingly, the question is whether this still exists. (p. 7f) Garreau doesn’t just throw out portraits of the “Enhanced,” as he calls them, to shock, nor are these preposterous constructions of his imagination. He references all these seemingly outlandish capacities and characteristics to actual scientific work in progress. The most ambitious work on the most “far out” ventures is carried out under the auspices of the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA – one of the world’s foremost drivers of human enhancement. Not surprisingly, it is national defense (or is it imperial offense) that is the driving force of this enterprise. DARPA doesn’t do the actual work but commissions leading research universities to do the research and experimentation – 90% of its budget of billions of dollars is spread around to schools like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon. If it determines there is a need for companies to exist, it sees that they are funded in order to be founded – companies such as Sun MicroSystems, Silicon Graphics, Cisco Systems. NASA was spun off from DARPA. The list of subsidized companies today is in the information industries because that is where the pay-off has been in the last few decades. In the eighties the push was for biologically inspired robots, since the nineties the focus has increasingly been on human biology through the Defense Sciences Office. I cite a paragraph simply to give you a sense of the radical potential of what is in process: Blinded rats are being made to see by Harry Whelan, a professor of neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In a battlefield, a laser powerful enough to burn is a very lethal thing if it is aimed at pilots’ eyes. Using light in the near-infrared spectrum, however, in a process called © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page10   photo-biomodulation, wound healing is accelerated. Vision in rats is being largely restored in anywhere from 5 to 24 hours – not yet quick enough to help pilots, but this is a work in progress. The research is sufficiently advanced that it is about to be tried on monkeys. The hope is that it will also mend wounds to skin, bone, neurons, cartilage, ligaments and tendons within four days. Whelan is also exploring what the process might do for spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease and brain tumors, as well as tissue and organ regeneration. If it works, he will have created something akin to the “physiostimulator” of the original Star Trek, the curative device Bones waves over injuries to heal them. The Navy SEALs are deeply interested in that. Henry is also directing a gaggle of researchers who have discovered that the natural chemical cascades in the body that stop bleeding can be triggered by signals from the brain. The implication of this is that you might be able to train people to stop hemorrhaging within minutes, simply by concentrating their mind on their wound. (p.27) For one not accustomed to the growing edge of the scientific-technological revolution, such possibilities are mind-boggling. But once again, this is not fantasy but hard science. Garreau has had his own “aha” moments when he suddenly awakened to the incredible dimensions of that about which he writes. Such a moment came as I realized that this story was not about computers. This cultural revolution in which we are immersed is no more a tale of bits and bytes than the story of Galileo is about paired lenses. In the Renaissance, the big deal was not telescopes. It was about realizing that the Earth is a minor planet revolving around an unexceptional star in an unfashionable part of the universe. Today, the story is no less attitudeadjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation. The inflection point at which we have arrived is one in which we are increasingly seizing the keys to all creation, as astounding as that might seem. It’s about what parents will do when offered ways to increase their child’s SAT score by 200 points. It’s about what athletes will do when encouraged by big-buck leagues to put together medical pit crews. What fat people will do when offered a gadget that will monitor and alter their metabolisms. What the aging will do when offered memory enhancers. What fading baby boomers will do when it becomes obvious that Viagra and Botox are just the beginning of the sex-appeal industry. Imagine that technology allows us to transcend seemingly impossible physical and mental barriers, not only for ourselves but, exponentially, for our children. What happens as we muck around with the most fundamental aspects of our identity? What if the only thing that is truly inevitable is taxes? This is © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page11   the transcendence of human nature we’re talking about here. What wisdom does transhuman power demand? (p. 11) “Moore’s Law” is named after Gordon E Moore who was one of the founders of Intel whose computer chip ushered in a new age. In 1965 he predicted that the complexity of microchips would double every year for the next ten years. This came to be called “Moore’s Law”– “The power of information technology will double every 18 months, for as far as the eye can see.” And it has proven to be the case. This doubling of the power of information technology has moved the curve of development in a straight line upward bringing us to the inflection point in human history we are experiencing and, Garreau writes, “The Curve implies one of the all-time changes in the rules. Those who study it call it “The Singularity.” ( p. 67) Garreau explains The Singularity concept thus: Vinge (rhymes with stingy, which he distinctly is not) in 1993 introduced the idea of The Singularity to describe huge but unpredictable social change driven by The Curve. In a seminal academic paper delivered to a NASA colloquium he wrote, “I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.” He’s anticipating the possibility of greater-than-human intelligence. He’s talking about some form of transcendence. As a metaphor for mind-boggling social change, The Singularity has been borrowed from math and physics. In those realms, singularities are the points where everything stops making sense. In math it is a point where you are dividing through by zero, for example. The result is so whacked out as to be meaningless. Physics has its black holes – points in space so dense that even light cannot escape their horrible gravity. If you were to approach one in a spaceship, you would find that even the laws of physics no longer seemed to function. That’s what a Singularity is like. “At this singularity,” writes Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time, “the laws of science and our ability to predict the future would break down.” Another borrowed metaphor is “the event horizon,” the point of no return as you approach a black hole. It is the place beyond which you cannot escape. It is also the point beyond which you cannot see. Some people think we are approaching such a Singularity – a point where our everyday world stops making sense. They think that’s what happens when The Curve goes almost straight up. The sheer magnitude of each doubling becomes unfathomable. ª (p. 71f) A helpful technique of Garreau is his condensing in a paragraph the major subjects he handles as he seeks to portray the present era in which we find © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page12   ourselves – the concepts of The Curve, The Singularity and the three possible futures that lie before us as a human global community. He gives us scenarios. He begins this method with a description of a scenario. What are Scenarios? Scenarios are rigorous, logical, but imaginative stories about what the future might be like, designed to help people plan. Scenarios are not predictions. They are tools for preparation. Recall how pilots just returning from combat – no matter how complex the conditions they encountered – frequently say, “It wasn’t as bad as the simulator.” That is the value of scenarios. Simulators do not predict the future; they allow those who use them to carefully and calmly anticipate and rehearse their response to almost any sudden eventuality. Think of them as idea maps. Scenarios have rules: they must conform to all known facts; identify “predetermineds” – future events so locked-in by those of the past that they can usefully be viewed as inevitable; identify “critical uncertainties” – possibilities that logically might occur in the future but which are both highly uncertain and highly important; identify “wild cards” – possible but highly improbably eventualities that would have great impact should they occur; reveal “embedded assumptions” – unprovable and often unexamined foundations on which our thinking about the future rests; and, identify in advance certain “early warnings” that serve as an alert that a particular scenario is coming to pass. ( p. 78f) With this description of a Scenario, Garreau describes what he has just discussed – The Curve and The Singularity. Subsequently he will put in capsule form what is his central purpose – describing three possible scenarios of the future given the present state of our science and technology: A Scenario of Heaven, of Hell and of what he calls Prevail. Reviewing his earlier discussion, he summarizes both The Curve and The Singularity. The Curve Scenario In this scenario, information technology continues to explode at a rate comparable to that from 1959 through the early 21st century. These unprecedented rapid doublings of information power and dramatically reduced costs continue to spawn new transformative technologies, such as genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. These in turn also proceed to grow at an unprecedented rate, merging and intertwining to produce novel opportunities and challenges. Within the current human generation, these events transform society and ultimately test the meaning of human nature itself. Predetermined elements: There are Curves of exponential change. Many of these describe the realities of technology. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page13   These Curves especially describe the increase in capabilities of information technology. The Curves of information technology increasingly enable new Curves of exponential change to emerge in other fields, especially genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. All of these Curves of exponential change have major impacts on society, culture and values. Critical uncertainties: Are the Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating, or will they display unexpected slowdowns, stops or reversals? Are these Curves of exponential change under the control of society’s culture and values, or are they impervious to human intervention? ( p. 80f) The Singularity Scenario (Builds on The Curve Scenario) In this scenario, The Curve of exponentially increasing technological change is unstoppable because new discoveries confer great advantage on those who adopt them – economically, militarily and even artistically. Either intentionally or accidentally, this leads, before 2030, to the creation of greater-than-human intelligence. This greater-than-human intelligence in turn proceeds to replicate and improve itself at such a rate as to exceed comprehension. This produces an inflection point in history called The Singularity, comparable to that in which humans rose from the lower animals. (Alternatively, The Singularity is triggered simply by the rate of change accelerating so greatly as to be beyond understanding, with or without the creation of greater-than-human intelligence.) The impact on everyday life is profound, as if we are being swept up by an avalanche. Succeeding scenarios in this book do not depend on The Singularity coming about. It would, however, dramatically influence the speed and scope of their outcome. Predetermined elements: There are Curves of exponential technological change. These Curves of exponential change especially describe information technology. These Curves of information technology increasingly enable new Curves of exponential change in other fields, especially genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. All of these Curves of exponential change have major social, cultural and value impacts. Critical uncertainties: Are The Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating, or will they display unexpected slowdowns, stops or reversals? © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page14   Are these Curves of exponential change under the control of society’s culture and values, or are they impervious to human intervention? Will software improve at a rate as great as hardware, or will human ingenuity be stymied by the sheer size, complexity and bugginess of the software required? If these Curves are predetermined, must they result in the creation of infinite change? If these Curves are predetermined, must they result in greater-thanhuman intelligence? If infinite change or greater-than-human intelligence is inevitable, will this happen soon – that is, before 2030? Embedded assumption: The only event that can alter this path is a cataclysm that will ruin civilization, such as nuclear war. (p. 82f) With the above framework for confronting the present moment in human history, Garreau moves to his purpose in writing – setting forth three possible Scenarios – as noted above: At least three alternative futures flow from this accelerated change, according to knowledgeable people who have thought about all this, as you will see in ensuing chapters. The first scenario is one in which, in the next two generations, humanity is rapidly replaced by something far more grand than its motley self. Call that The Heaven Scenario. The second is the one in which in the next 25 years or so, humanity meets a catastrophic end. Call it The Hell Scenario. You will find chapters on each, because both scenarios are plausible, and either would lead to the end of human history as we know it, and soon. The third scenario is more complex. It is the one we might call The Prevail Scenario. In this scenario, the future is not predetermined. It is full of hiccups and reverses and loops, all of which are the product of human beings coming to grips with their own destinies. In this world, our values can and do shape our future. We do have choices; we are not at the mercy of large forces. We can prevail. The Heaven Scenario – The Vision of Ray Kurzweil Ray Kurzweil may be one of the greatest creative geniuses to have ever lived. His imagination seems never to cease and he has the brilliance to actualize that of which he dreams. Soon after college he developed three technologies – the first practical flatbed scanner which resulted in a multibillion-dollar industry. He invented the character recognition device that could read any typeface and he invented the first full text-to-speech synthesizer which together brought The Kurzweil Reading Machine to life. Kurzweil has created nine technology companies that continue to be leaders in their fields. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page15   Kurzweil has become famous however because of his writing. The 1989 The Age Of Intelligent Machines predicted the World Wide Web, the chess championship by a computer and the dominance of intelligent weapons in warfare – all pretty far-fetched at the time. In 1999 he published The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence in which he predicted, because of The Curve, many intelligences will roam the earth that are not traditional humans. His 2005 work, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, goes further, laying out the case for the imminent and cataclysmic upheaval in human affairs associated with The Singularity: But even that isn’t the audacious part. What makes Kurzweil an outrage to some and an inspiration to others is that he is relentlessly and fiercely optimistic about these futures. He uses charts and graphs to systematically portray a near future that to some seems indistinguishable from the Christian version of paradise. On top of everything else, he is convinced that medicine is moving sufficiently fast that any person who can stay healthy for the next 20 years may so benefit from the explosion in biological technology as to be immortal. He lays out an extensive scientific, nonreligious, non-New Age case for personally planning to live for a thousand years. When challenged, he doesn’t retreat from his logic at all. Once, to rattle his cage, I paraphrased the author Arthur C. Clarke’s renowned line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I asked him, So, Ray, what are you saying? That any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from angels? He did not back off an inch. “Depends on what you mean by angels,” he replied. I call his scenario Heaven. (p. 90f) Kurzweil was born of Viennese Jews who fled the Nazi Holocaust coming to the United States where he was born. He still belongs to a Reform temple but more as a cultural identification. His parents, wishing to avoid the provincialism of narrow religions, joined a Unitarian church which introduced Ray to a broad spectrum of religious understanding through which he came to understand the different religious stories as speaking the same truth. Today his is a “Buddhist’s view of God – as the sort of life force, the force of creativity, as opposed to a specific cranky personality that makes deals with humanity and gets mad and exacts vengeance.” This worship of a life force fuels his optimism about the coming transcendence of human nature. “What we see in evolution is increasingly accelerating intelligence, beauty. We find evolving organisms, like humans, that are capable of higher emotions like love. I mean, if you go to the point where there were just reptiles, there was no love. They don’t have much emotional intelligence. They don’t have art, music. So part of © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page16   the evolutionary process – and this has continued with our technological growth of human cultural and technological history – is an increase of those higher emotional, intelligent functions. We see exponentially greater love. “Even 200 years ago, 98 or 99 percent of human beings lived lives of utter desperation. Extreme poverty. Extreme labor. Spending all their time to prepare the evening meal. Extremely disaster-prone. No social safety nets. Now at least an increasing portion of human civilization is free of that level of desperation. So our ability to appreciate arts and music and to have stable relationships is increasing. That was relatively difficult to do even 200 years ago, let alone thousands of years ago.” ( p. 93) Garreau summarizes the core of Kurzweil’s thinking thus: The core element of Kurzweil’s thinking is that The Curve of exponentially increasing technology is rising smoothly, as if on rails. It is in command, in his view, and unstoppable. Everything flows from that. He sees The Curve as a force of nature. He sees it as an extension of evolution. He does not particularly see The Curve as something humans chose to create. Like evolution, it is simply a pattern of life to be recognized, the outcome of billions of small actions. He calls it “The Law of Accelerating Returns.” In his view, nothing any one country or collection of countries can do will deflect it or even slow it down. Forget oil shocks or climate change. The only possible limit he sees is a complete and catastrophic collapse of civilization or the extinction of the human species, worldwide, and he only inserts that as something of a rhetorical footnote. “Exponential progress, in recent times, has marched right through” disasters such as the Depression and World War II, he observes. “It really is an evolutionary process. Biological evolution is full of unpredictable events like visitors from outer space in the form of meteors and asteroids. But nonetheless, out of that chaos comes a very smooth curve. Now the progress is so rapid that The Curves are on a very fast track. But they still emerge from an evolutionary process that is full of disruption. I mean, a lot of people ask me, “Well, now with 9/11 things must be different? Or with the high-tech recession and the meltdown of communications and Internet stocks, surely that has disrupted these curves?” Well, no they haven’t, Kurzweil says. ( p. 94) It is difficult to dispute Kurzweil’s claim that the Curve is simply the ongoing march of the cosmic evolutionary process into which we humans have come to participate and, to some extent, direct. A brief historical review is fascinating as Garreau sets it out. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page17   The essence of The Heaven Scenario is stealing fire from the gods, breathing life into inert matter and gaining immortality. Our efforts to become something more than human have a long and distinguished genealogy. Tracing the history of those efforts illuminates human nature. In every civilization, in every era, we have given the gods no peace. Efforts to transcend our origins begin in the most primitive of times. Sorcerers would create a likeness of a living thing and, with the rituals of magic, seek to animate it. In our earliest epic, the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, the climax is the king seeking, finding and losing the secret of immortality. Barely three pages into Genesis, the serpent is telling Eve that she doesn’t have to worry about losing immortality by tasting of the fruit of knowledge. No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be open and you will be like gods.” He says. (Not coincidentally, one of the biggest attractions of Christianity, even as an upstart religion, was its promise of eternal life.) Ancient Greece was full of heroes harassing the deities. Prometheus not only created humans, teaching them many of their useful skills, but he filched fire for them. Daedalus confounded King Minos by crafting wings of wax and feathers to flee Crete. His son Icarus, of course, flew too close to the sun, giving us one of our earliest warnings against taking presumptuous pride in our technologies. But remember, Daedalus did succeed – his mythic wings worked, and ancient Greece gave us the tools of logic, skepticism and natural philosophy that became the underpinnings of science. The market for harvest and fertility goddesses has never been the same. The cultural humanism of the Renaissance pushed ancient pieties aside. Make something of yourself! was its message to mankind. Human nature was not predetermined by anybody’s secondhand image and likeness in this view. We could shape ourselves to make the world better. Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance, eloquently centers all attention on human capabilities. In it, says God to Adam: “We give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose.” Indeed, in 1580, the kabbalistic Jews of Prague imagined creating a Golem – an artificial man made from clay – who would protect them from persecution. Galileo, as he laid the foundations of modern science, believed that for peering directly into the mind of God, there was nothing like a telescope. It was more profitable to study the deity’s handiwork than it was to study scripture. “Philosophy,” he wrote, “is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.” © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page18   The Age of Enlightenment elevated scientists over priests. The notion was that the logically deduced laws that governed human behavior were an even purer expression of God’s law than that which could be gathered from scripture. Since God’s law will always work to good ends, the same must be true of the natural laws governing our individual lives, this hypothesis concluded. Francis Bacon was among the first to see critical reasoning as a means of finding the destiny and nature of man. “The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied for the keeping off and clearing away of idols,” Bacon wrote in Novum Organum in 1620. He saw it as a new grounding for morality and, indeed, the perfection of society. The idea of a rationally discovered natural law to achieve a heaven on earth would fuel both the American and French revolutions…. In 1780, Benjamin Franklin wrote to the chemist, biologist and minister Joseph Priestley, “The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce; all disease may by sure means be prevented or cured (not excepting even that of old age), and our lives lengthened at pleasure….. (p. 106f) Turning from Kurzweil, Garreau points to a document of 415 pages entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. The document is the joint publication of the National Science Foundation and The United States Department of Commerce and affirms “It is time to rekindle the spirit of the Renaissance” to achieve “a golden age that will be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life. ( p. 112) The report concludes, “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.” (p. 114) Garreau points out that the leading scholars of this aspect of The Heaven Scenario point to the future of human genetics. He cites Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at The School of Medicine at UCLA: Stock’s version of The Heaven Scenario departs from Kurzweil’s He doesn’t think humans will transcend because of computers. He things humans will transcend because of genetic engineering. Such biological remodeling is “a plausible way for people to overcome their bodily frailties, but a larger game is afoot,” he says. It is “biology’s bid to keep pace with the rapid evolution of computer technology.” © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page19   “No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?” he approvingly quotes James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA, as saying. The titles of several of Stock’s books display his position. One is called Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. An earlier one is called Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism. “To not be human in the sense we use the term now” is the fate of our descendants, Stock says. We will soon see humans as physically and intellectually divergent as “poodles and Great Danes.” But the passing of people like us is hardly a tragedy, he believes. “Unlike the saber-toothed tiger and other large mammals that left no descendants when our ancestors drove them to extinction, Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding its evolution.” ( p. 115) The acronym GRIN stands for four interrelated technologies that together are in process of modifying human nature – Genetics, Robotics, Information and Nano processes. Beyond what has been discussed about Information and Genetics, amazing possibilities are being realized in nanotechnology and robotics but to discuss that here in a meaningful way is beyond both this writer’s capacity and purpose. Rather let me bring this discussion of The Heaven Scenario to conclusion. Garreau concludes The Heaven Scenario by returning to Kurzweil. Do you believe in a God you plan on meeting when you die? I ask. “I’m not planning to die,” Kurzweil responds. “I expect to use the power of ideas. I am a survivor as an entrepreneur and a human being. It’s my plan to be involved in this next phase of humanity where we get past some of the frailties of these Version 1.0 bodies we have. The way to ‘meet our maker,’ so to speak, is, in fact, by staying alive. We will be part of this very rapid explosion of intelligence, and beauty, and a very rapid acceleration of this evolutionary process. And that, to me, is what God is. Evolution, I think, is a spiritual process because it moves closer to what we have considered God. It moves closer to infinity.” I am nonplussed by this answer. He is not talking about us someday meeting God. He is talking about us becoming God. Aware of how this sounds, he rephrases a little. “I don’t think we actually ever become God. But we do become more God-like,” he clarifies. He then barrels right back to a grand view of The Heaven Scenario. “I see it, ultimately, as an awakening of the whole universe. I think the whole universe right now is basically made up of dumb matter and energy and I think it will wake up. But if it becomes transformed into this sublimely intelligent matter and energy, I hope to be a part of that.” He is talking about participating in the creation of Heaven. (p. 128f) © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page20   That is radical evolution indeed; Garreau has titled his account accurately and his portrayal of the present state and future potential of the exploding and intertwining scientific-technological enterprise backs up the claim that we are on the cusp of radical evolution. Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees that the scenario in process is one of “Heaven.” Equally brilliant and responsible leaders in the fields of science and technology suggest with alarm that we are on the threshold of Hell. The most articulate spokesperson for such a claim is Bill Joy. The Hell Scenario – The Joyless Fears of Bill Joy Though Joy sloughs it off, he has been called “The Edison of the Internet”. Garreau affirms the comparison. Yet the comparison is not all wrong. Joy’s had a hand in some of the most important aspects of the Net. In 1978, while still a grad student, Joy became the principal programmer for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project inventing the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), the first operating system linking computers over this newfangled thing that would come to be called the Internet. (“It was fun,” he says, predictably enough.) In the early 21st century, the BSD architecture was still the main rival to Microsoft’s server system, being the basis of Apple’s OS X operating system and Sun’s machines, and an underpinning of Linux. In 1982, Joy married that system to a cheap but powerful computer called the S.U.N. workstation, after the Stanford University Network. This is how he wound up as chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, until he resigned the post in 2003…. Joy enjoys a reputation in Silicon Valley as thoughtful and level-headed. “Nobody is more phlegmatic than Bill,” says Stewart Brand, the Internet pioneer. “He is the adult in the room.” That’s why it came as such a shock in March 2000 when this godfather of the Information Age predicted “something like extinction” of the human race within the next generation. Most extraordinarily, he blamed it on the accelerating pace of technological change he had helped create. He intended his warning to be reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s famous 1939 letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerting him to the possibility of the atomic bomb. (p. 137f) In the journal Wired, April, 2000, Bill Joy wrote a powerful essay in which he expressed his shock at the rapid advance of the technology in which he himself was engaged and the potential for bringing the human story to its end. The essay is entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” and a bold print subtitle gives the essence of the piece – Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page21   Bill Joy relates the moment that his unease with the whole current direction in which new technologies are being created arose. At a telecom conference, he listened to a Berkeley philosopher, John Searle, discuss with the famous inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil, the acceleration toward the time we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that. John Searle said it couldn’t happen because the robots couldn’t be conscious, but Kurzweil said such a phenomenon was a near-term possibility. Joy writes, I was taken aback, especially given Ray’s proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me. Kurzweil gave Joy a preprint of his then forthcoming book, The Age of Spiritual Machines in which he described the utopia he foresaw – One in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology.. Joy was sobered and his unease intensified; he felt certain the dangers were being underestimated, failing to understand the potential of a tragic outcome. He found himself most troubled by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario – that is a scenario of a state or situation in which conditions and the quality of life are terrible. This is the disturbing passage which Joy introduces with the subheading, The New Luddite Challenge First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case, presumably, all work will be done by vast, organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But, we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page22   for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. On the other hand, it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case, the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques, the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite are ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of softhearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. And, now here is the shocker, in Joy’s words: In the book, you don’t discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore Kaczynski – the Unabomber. …Kaczynski’s actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it. Kaczynski’s dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a wellknown problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is clearly related to Murphy’s Law – “Anything that can go wrong, will.”…The cause of many such surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction among and feedback between © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page23   many parts. Any changes to such a system will cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when human actions are involved. I started showing friends the Kaczynski quote from The Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil’s book, let them read the quote, and then watch their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time, I found Hans Moravec’s book, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in robotics research, and was a founder of the world’s largest robotics research program at Carnegie Mellon University. Robot gave me more material to try out on my friends – material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski’s argument. According to Moravec, …our main job in the 21st century will be “ensuring continued cooperation from the robot industries” by passing laws decreeing that they be “nice,” and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be “once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot.” Moravec’s view is that the robots will eventually succeed us – that humans clearly face extinction. Joy wonders why more people do not share his concern and unease and suggests an answer: …Accustomed to living with almost routine scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21stcentury technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology – pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots share a dangerous amplifying factor: they can self-replicate. A bomb is blown up only once – but one bot can become many, and quickly get out of control. Much of my work over the past 25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled selfreplication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk of substantial damage in the physical world. Each of these technologies also offers untold promise: the vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average life span © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page24   and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger. Joy summarizes what he sees as the clear and present danger that confronts us: The 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them. Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals. That is a sobering conclusion from a very responsible and well-informed scientist who has made his mark as one of the chief architects of the present state of cybertechnology. And he declares, “…I trust it is clear that I am not a Luddite.” Rather, he affirms a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and the ability of great engineering to bring material progress. Why is he surprised to find himself in his present state of unease and foreboding? Because, he writes, Perhaps it is always hard to see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that is the nature of science’s quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own. This is what he sees developing before our eyes: As this enormous computing power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of human endeavor. In designing software and microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an intelligent machine. The software and hardware is © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page25   so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to “think” so clearly absent that, even as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future. But now, with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine. My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities. Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution? There is much more in Joy’s essay, but what I have lifted up is surely enough to answer his question in the affirmative. Let me be clear – in all of this discussion of the accelerating pace of technological breakthroughs, I am over my head; nanotechnology is beyond my capacity to conceive. When I read of molecular level “assemblers” and that “one kind of nanomachine is the assembler, which is a tiny factory that can manufacture other machines, including replicas of itself,” I confess I am in a deep fog. But, I can at least catch some sense of the frontiers on which research and development is being executed. What it means that there will be robotic humans or human robots, I can hardly imagine, but I am now aware that this is no longer the stuff of science fiction; this is where we have arrived and where the next two or three decades will bring us if we survive – an open question! Joy puts it this way: The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20thcentury weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century genetic, nanotech, robotic technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology – with science as its handmaiden – is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page26   This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself – as well as to vast numbers of others. And then he continues: It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds – a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish. That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, in Pale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan’s contribution was not least that of simple common sense – an attribute that, along with humility, many of the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack. Well, there you have it – one person of genius celebrating our near approach to an heavenly existence, the other of equal stature predicting the damnation of hell. Which will it be? And is there no third way? Garreau answers in the affirmative – a Third Scenario. Prevail Garreau introduces us to a fascinating human being named Jaron Zepel Lanier, “one of the world’s more startling combinations of philosopher, creative artist and computer scientist” – a remarkable combination of gifts and interests, described thus: He is best known, however, for inventing “virtual reality” as a shared experience, and naming it. In his early 20’s Lanier founded VPL Research – yes, in a garage in California. It was the first company to provide research labs around the world with the then-almost-magical virtualreality paraphernalia. When he was 24, his groundbreaking work made the cover of Scientific American. Few recent innovations have had such consequences. It is difficult to buy an automobile or fly in an airplane today that wasn’t designed in virtual reality. The petroleum to fuel them © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page27   was probably found with Lanier’s inventions. City planning, building design, surgery and scientific visualization – especially of molecules important to the creation of new drugs and the understanding of proteins and genes – are being redefined by virtual-reality imaging. So is the training of police, firefighters, emergency response teams and the military. In the early 21st-century, Lanier was the chief scientist of Advanced Network and Services, the engineering office of Internet2 – a coalition of 180 American research universities sharing an experimental nextgeneration network so powerful that when they fired it up, lights dimmed all over campus, or so the story goes. He led the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. It aimed to create alternative worlds in which people at distant sites work together in a shared, simulated environment that makes them feel as if they were in the same world. “Our social contract with our own tools has brought us to a point where we have to decide fairly soon what it is we humans ought to become because we are on the brink of having the power of creating any experience we desire,” writes Howard Rheingold, an analyst of technology’s impact on society. Virtual reality “represents a kind of new contract between human and computers, an arrangement that could grant us great power, and perhaps change us irrevocably in the process.” (p. 191f) Lanier claims, “The degree to which I was a social failure is impossible to even state…It was just extreme beyond…” He had no friends in a hostile environment. Such an early life experience, Lanier points to as putting him on the track to The Prevail Scenario. Garreau compares Kurzweil, Joy and Lanier: When faced by the prospect of a sudden transformation of human nature, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Jaron Lanier each responds from the deep recesses of his soul. Kurzweil worships the power of ideas to resolve all problems; Joy in his lonely fashion engages death; Lanier attributes all his subsequent work to finding “the connection I lost.” The thinking of Kurzweil, Joy and Lanier describes a triangle. Lanier’s is not some middle vision between that of Kurzweil and Joy. He is off in an entirely other territory that pokes and prods their technological determinism. Lanier agrees with Kurzweil that it is not tremendously likely that you can stop radical evolution by willing it gone. He agrees with Joy that The Curve could lead to mortal dangers. Yet Lanier would not relinquish transcendence even were that possible. Indeed, he views the prospect of exploring all the ways humans could expand their connections as the greatest adventure on which the species has ever embarked. Lanier’s critical difference is that he does not see The Curve © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page28   yielding some inevitable, preordained result, as in the fashion of the Heaven and Hell Scenarios. “If it turns out Bill or Ray are right, I’ll be disappointed mostly because it’s such a profoundly dull and unheroic outcome,” he says. “It’s such a gizmo outcome. There is no depth to it at all.” Lanier believes it is well within the power of the species to transcend to something far beyond the current understanding of human nature. He just views as sterile the prospect of uploading some portion of our brains into computers. Instead, he pictures a rich and tasty brew of opportunities. He can see a vast array of transcendences. He imagines humans making intelligent decisions, exercising creative control. If you were graphing Lanier’s idea, it would not be represented by smooth curves, either up or down, as in the first two scenarios. It would doubtless have fits and starts, hiccups and coughs, reverses and loops – not unlike the history we humans always have known. It would be messy and chaotic, like humans themselves. Technology would not be in control. It would not be on rails, inexorably deciding human affairs. At the same time, the outcome would definitely involve radical change. I call visions like this The Prevail Scenario. Uncertainty suffuses The Prevail Scenario. For Lanier, that’s not a bug. It’s a feature. “The universe doesn’t provide us a way to have absolute truth,” he says. “I am not fanatical about my ideas. I’m perfectly happy to see where there are holes in them. This idea is something I believe – in the sense that I act on it. But let me tell you the trap I want to avoid falling into.” He judges Kurzweil and Joy to be “severe exaggerators and overstaters. Their reasoning is similar to that of a paranoid person in that they find only the little bits that fit into their worldview and build this cage in which they imprison themselves. I’m not willing to be a fanatic and demand that people see that every bit of data supports my view. I want to be given the latitude to present my own thing more softly. I actually perceive it with less of a sense of certainty and bullheadedness. It’s just my best guess.” His key point about The Prevail Scenario: “I will argue for perceiving a gradual ramp of increased bridging of the interpersonal gap. I believe that that’s demonstrable. I do not perceive it as being an exponential increase. I do not perceive it as something where there is an economy of scale and it’s compounding itself and it’s heading towards some asymptotic point. I am not saying it’s accelerating.” The Prevail Scenario, he’s saying, is measured by its impact on human society. He is specifically arguing that even if technology is on a curve, its impact is not. This is why he is skeptical about the idea of a Singularity – technology increasing so © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page29   quickly as to create an imminent and cataclysmic upheaval in human affairs. In his version of The Prevail Scenario, Lanier is talking about transcendence through an “infinite game.” “The future that I’m trying to find is one where people are in the center and there’s this everyexpanding game of connecting people that creates a game into the future.” (p. 195ff) In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse writes of the familiar contests of everyday life – played in business and politics, in the bedroom and the battlefield. Finite games have winners and losers, a beginning and an end and players try to control the game and set the bottom line in advance and are serious and determined about getting that outcome, fixing the future based on the past. But players of infinite games, by contrast “enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn’t know will ensure that the game will go on forever…A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play…Infinite players play with the rules. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is an infinite game, Lanier believes. Infinite games are the real transcendence games. They allow you to transcend your boundaries. They allow you to transcend who you are.” (p. 197) Reading Lanier’s thoughts one cannot help but sense quite a different spirit and tone than we found in both the Heaven and Hell Scenarios. Lanier is dismissive of what he describes as “the religion of the elite technologists,” from Moravec to Minsky, in the halls of “true believers” at Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. They believe in a key anticipated outcome of The Heaven Scenario: “That computers are becoming autonomous and a successor species.” “My feeling about spiritual questions is that there is a tightrope that I try to stay on, not always successfully. If you fall to the right side, you become an excessive reductionist. You pretend to know more than you do and you become overly rational. If you fall to the left side, you become superstitious and you believe that there are magic tricks of meaning. Staying right on that line is where you’re a skeptic but also acknowledge the degree of mystery in our lives. If you can adhere to that, I think that’s where truth lies. Sometimes it’s lonely and frustrating. For a lot of these questions, I think ‘I don’t know’ is the most dignified and profound answer. A profound ‘I don’t know’ is the result of a lot of work.” Lanier wants to stay open to the possibility that “the world we manipulate here isn’t all there is. The world accessible by technologies isn’t all there is. I don’t want to become a superstitious fool and believe I can say anything about this other world. That’s very important. I don’t want to © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page30   start saying, ‘Oh, there are these angels here.’ The idea of God as an entity that talks and stuff doesn’t quite fit for me. It’s also not something I’m gonna dismiss.” He makes a small joke by pretending to be the systems administrator of all creation: “We have limited privileges in this area.” To describe his version of transcendence in a Prevail Scenario without falling off his tightrope, Lanier likes to talk about octopi. Actually, he also likes to talk about the psychology of early childhood, as well as the day that aliens visit the earth and perceive human nature for the first time. But these to him are all stories about the same thing – a steadily increasing ramp to transcendence that leads to deeper and better ways of bridging the interpersonal gap. Lanier’s Prevail Scenario is the search for a complex, evolving, inventive transcendence. Because it is an infinite game, it never goes into a Singularity, as in the Heaven and Hell Scenarios. Because it’s fundamentally imaginative, it doesn’t have any such simple measurement. It just expands forever. Human connectedness is “a much more profound kind of ramp,” Lanier believes. “The thing about a Singularity hypothesis is that it’s profoundly uncreative.” (p. 199f) There are unlimited Prevail Scenarios but Garreau claims Lanier’s is well articulated. They all, however, begin with these principles: • Humans have an uncanny history of muddling through – of forging unlikely paths to improbable futures in defiance of historical forces that seem certain and inevitable; • The wellspring of this muddling through, of this prevailing, is the ability of ordinary people facing overwhelming odds to rise to the occasion because it is the right thing – for example, the British “nation of shopkeepers” that defied the Third Reich. To these, Garreau relates, Lanier adds one more proposition: • Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways. Thus, Garreau concludes, Prevail is an odd combination of the marvelously ordinary and the utterly unprecedented. It is so common and so rare – so old and so new – that the history of the Prevail Scenario is less well defined than that of The Heaven or Hell Scenario. (p. 206). It is not predictable by use of human logic. Ironically, it is driven by faith “in human cussedness;” we can be counted on to throw The Curve a curve! And one more proposition from Lanier regarding Prevail: • The key measure of Prevail’s success is an increasing intensity of links between humans, not transistors. If some sort of transcendence is achieved beyond today’s © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page31   understanding of human nature, it will not be through some individual becoming superman. In Lanier’s Prevail Scenario, transcendence is social, not solitary. The measure is the extent to which many transform together. (p. 210) Lanier measures the idea of progress by technological and economic advance – fire, the wheel, the steam engine. There is a second ramp – moral improvement. But neither of these is sufficient; for Lanier the third ramp is the increased connection between people. That is the real measure of the idea of progress. The third ramp, historically, starts with the invention of language and then moves to writing, drama, literature, printing, film, the telephone, radio, television, the Internet and so forth. “What you are measuring is an increase in the quantity, quality, variety and complexity of the ways humans can connect with each other. Not ways in which they become identical, but ways that they become closer. (p. 214) Garreau concludes his Radical Evolution with a chapter entitled “Transcend,” which he begins by recounting his experience at a conference called “The Adaptable Human Body: Transhumanism and Bioethics in the 21st Century” cosponsored by the Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Program Working Research Group on Technology and Ethics and a young organization called The World Transhumanist Association. Transhumanists are focused on the enhancement of human intellectual, physical and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of lifespan ( p. 231).Transhumanists believe it naïve to think the human condition and human nature will remain pretty much the same for much longer. They believe rather that the GRIN technologies are fundamentally changing the rules of the game. The transcend proposition rests on three premises: •The undeniable competitive advantages that the genetic, robotic, information and nano technologies convey on those who embrace them for economic, medical, educational, military, or artistic reasons suggest that these methods will continue to advance at an ever-increasing rate. •So many of these technologies – “designer babies,” augmented cognition, metabolic makeovers, anti-aging medicine and all the rest – can alter basics of the human condition. If they can modify our minds, memories, metabolisms, progeny and personalities, it seems reasonable to think that these procedures might well have an impact on what it means to be human. • The history of technologies as disruptive as these suggests that there will be unintended consequences. We will be surprised by many of the outcomes. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page32   If you accept these three propositions as reasonable bets, what you’re looking at is that rare bird, the high probability, high-impact scenario. Transcend builds on, expands and gives measure to The Prevail Scenario, in which technology does not control us, but we control technology. ( p. 233f) As he draws together the lines of the three scenarios with his discussion of transcendence, Garreau states that “the central argument about the future of human nature is whether it is fixed and immutable, once and forever, or whether it can continue to evolve.” (p. 235) A number of scholars from a variety of disciplines are heard from. Garreau has succeeded in presenting the respective scenarios honestly and without prejudice. His own leaning, however, would seem to be toward The Prevail Scenario and his final chapter reflects the manner of the Transcendence he affirms and the spiritual dimension such transcendence calls for. Coming down on the side of a continuing evolution, he recognizes the necessity of an evolving spirituality to guide that evolution in a positive, lifeaffirming direction. He writes, “Perhaps it is with our devotions that we can start choosing to steer. Right now the stories we tell do not match the facts.” (p.264) He recognizes as the most influential thinker of the twentieth century, seeking to unify the truths of science and religion, the French Jesuit scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, 1940, he argued that someday our technology would allow us to create a web of thought and action that would make the world more complex, diverse and alive, moving humankind toward an ultimate evolution – the Omega Point. He envisioned the earth as a single living organism, with all the elements of it – from the people to the birds connected like cells in a body. The goal of evolution, he suggested, is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to the whole of Being. With the rise of the World Wide Web, we can see hints that he may have been right. Although Garreau does not pursue Teilhard any further, it is interesting that this amazing prophetic voice recognized the imperative of spiritual transformation in light of exploding technological breakthroughs and especially in light of the explosion of the atomic bomb whose anniversary we mark today. Teilhard believed so strongly, both as a religious thinker and as a scientist in the evolutionary process and the ongoing forward movement toward the Omega Point as he called it – a process not pushed from behind but pulled from the future, that he was not critical of the development of research on the splitting of the atom. He quoted The New Yorker, August 18, 1945, in the wake of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – “Political plans for the new world, as shaped by statesmen, are not fantastic enough. The only conceivable way to catch up with atomic energy is with political energy directed to a universal structure” – The Future of Man, p. 146. This citation appeared in an essay entitled, “Some Reflections on the Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom Bomb.” He was aware of the devastating potential of the splitting of the atom but was so © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page33   convinced of the forward progress of the Evolutionary Process which he understood in total cosmic breadth, that he foresaw the event as leading not only to a massive leap forward in scientific and technological mastery but to spiritual growth as well. The following citations will indicate his confidence. Thus the greatest of Man’s scientific triumphs happens also to be the one in which the largest number of brains were enabled to join together in a single organism, at the same time more complex and more centred, for the purpose of research. Was this simply coincidence? Did it not rather show that in this as in other fields nothing in the universe can resist the converging energies of a sufficient number of minds sufficiently grouped and organized? Thus considered, the fact of the release of nuclear energy, overwhelming and intoxicating though it was, began to seem less tremendous. Was it not simply the first act, even a mere prelude, in a series of fantastic events which, having afforded us access to the heart of the atom, would lead us on to overthrow, one by one, the many other strongholds which science is already besieging? The vitalisation of matter by the creation of supermolecules. The re-modelling of the human organism by means of hormones. Control of heredity and sex by the manipulation of genes and chromosomes. The readjustment and internal liberation of our souls by direct action upon springs gradually brought to light by psycho-analysis. The arousing and harnessing of the unfathomable intellectual and effective powers still latent in the human mass….Is not every kind of effect produced by a suitable arrangement of matter? And have we not reason to hope that in the end we shall be able to arrange every kind of matter, following the results we have obtained in the nuclear field? (p. 149) ….But now, after that famous sunrise in Arizona, he can no longer doubt. He not only can but, of organic necessity, he must for the future assist in his own genesis. The first phase was the creation of mind through the obscure, instinctive play of vital forces. The second phase is the rebounding and acceleration of mind itself, the only principle in the world capable of combining and using for the purpose of Life, and on the planetary scale, the still-dispersed or slumbering energies of matter and of thought. It is broadly in these terms that we are obliged henceforth to envisage the grand scheme of things of which, by the fact of our existence, we find ourselves a part. (p. 150) …To me it seems that thanks to the atom bomb it is war, not mankind, that is destined to be eliminated, and for two reasons. The first, which we all know and long for, is that the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands must render all armed conflict impossible. But what is even more important, although we have thought less about it, is that war will be eliminated at its source in our hearts because, compared with the vast field © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page34   for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its triumphs will soon appear trivial and outmoded. Now that a true objective is offered us, one that we can only attain by striving with all our power in a concerted effort, our future action can only be convergent, drawing us together in an atmosphere of sympathy. I repeat, sympathy, because to be ardently intent upon a common object is inevitably the beginning of love. In affording us a biological, ‘phyletic’ outlet directed upwards, the shock which threatened to destroy us will have the effect of giving us a sense of direction and a dynamic force and finally (within certain limits) of making us of one mind. The atomic age is not the age of destruction but of union in research. For all their military trappings, the recent explosions at Bikini herald the birth into the world of a Mankind both inwardly and outwardly pacified. They proclaim the coming of the Spirit of the Earth…. (p. 152) In short, the final effect of the light cast by the atomic fire into the spiritual depths of the earth is to illumine within them the overriding question of the ultimate end of Evolution – that is to say, the problem of God. (p. 153) The great scientist, humanist Albert Einstein, was not as sanguine about the atomic breakthrough. Teilhard, so convinced of evolutionary progress, recognized the need for a supra-national governing authority to control the atomic breakthrough, but that was not what was his over-riding concern. For Einstein it was. In his 700-page volume, Einstein On Peace, (including notes and index) one could cite his grave concern on almost any page. While Einstein’s passion for supra-sovereign authority and the end of war is not the subject of this address, in light of yet another anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, I quote Einstein in this context. Before the raid on Hiroshima, leading physicists urged the War Department not to use the bomb against defenseless women and children. The war could have been won without it. The decision was made in consideration of possible future loss of American lives; but now we have to consider the possible loss, in future atomic bombings, of millions of lives. The American decision may have been a fatal error, for men accustom themselves to thinking that a weapon which was used once can be used again. Had we allowed other nations to witness the text explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, the bomb would have served as an education for new ideas. This would have been an impressive and favorable moment to make considered proposals for world order to end war. Our renunciation of this weapon as too terrible to use would have carried great weight in negotiations and would have convinced the other nations of our sincerity in asking for their co-operation in developing these newly unleashed powers for good and peaceful purposes. (p. 386) © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page35   In an interview with newscaster Robert Trout, CBS, May 28, 1946, Einstein was asked, “And you believe, Dr. Einstein, that this thinking man can solve our great problem for us?” Einstein gave a lengthy answer which began, “I believe nothing else can.” Further along in the interview, prompted by Archibald MacLeish, Einstein said, “Just as we have changed our thinking in the world of pure science to embrace newer and more useful concepts, so we must now change our thinking in the world of politics and law. It is too late to make mistakes.” (p. 378f) Garreau brings his discussion of transcendence to a close on a religious note. Humans find an absence of explanations for how the world works profoundly unsettling. That’s why the search for this new grand story becomes important. Yet when you start talking to professionals who are thinking about what this narrative might be like, you find it to be an almost entirely secular group – the subject of God rarely comes up. I am not particularly religious myself, but the American people overwhelmingly are. So it occurred to me to wonder what transcendence might have meant historically to the worldwide range of the devout. You’d think over the last three thousand years or so, we might find a few hints in their work as to how to think about this fix. (p. 257) Garreau points to Karen Armstrong and her reference to Karl Jaspers, the German philosopher of history, who spoke of the Axial Age – “a period of unique and fundamental focus on transcendence that is “the beginning of humanity as we now know it.” All over the world, humans simultaneously began to wake up to a burning need to grapple with deep and cosmic questions. All the major religious beliefs are rooted in this period. “The search for spiritual breakthrough was no less intense and urgent than the pursuit of technological advance is in our own,” she says. “That’s quite endorsing, actually. Instead of seeing your own tradition as an idiosyncratic, lonely quest, it becomes part of what human beings do, part of a universal search for meaning and value. This is the kind of scenario that the human mind goes through in its search for ultimate meaning.” “If there is an axis in history, we must find it empirically,” Jaspers wrote. The spiritual process which took place between 800 and 200 B.C. seems to constitute such an axis. It was then that the man with whom we live today came into being. Let us designate this period as the “axial age”. Extraordinary events are crowded into this period. In China lived Confucius and Lao Tse, all the trends in Chinese philosophy arose, it was the era of Mo Tse, Chuang Tse and countless others. In India it was the age of the upanishads and of Buddha; as in China, all philosophical trends, including skepticism and materialism, sophistry and nihilism, were © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page36   developed. In Iran Zarathustra put forward his challenging conception of the cosmic process as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine prophets arose: Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, the tragic poets, Thucydides, Archimedes. All the vast development of which these names are a mere intimation took place in these few centuries, independently and almost simultaneously in China, India and the West. The new element in this age is that man everywhere became aware of being as a whole, of himself and his limits. He experienced the horror of the world and his own helplessness. He raised radical questions, approached the abyss in his drive for liberation and redemption. And in consciously apprehending his limits he set himself the highest aims. He experienced the absolute in the depth of selfhood and in the clarity of transcendence. Armstrong is fascinated by the human universals operating amid the tumultuous upheaval of that cultural revolution. What caused dispersed civilizations simultaneously to develop these broad, transcendent ideas? There is no human culture that does not incorporate some notion of religion. Even nonbelievers develop systems such as Marxism that sport all the trappings of religion. This evidence causes Armstrong to believe that religion is an essential human need, as unlikely to be outgrown as our need for art. She sees religion as a universal search for meaning and values. She believes it is hardwired. “Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation,” Armstrong writes. “They will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning.” Think of the constellations in the night sky. Humans eagerly connect dots and come up with the most elaborate – even poetic tales, adorning them with heroes and myths, rather than tolerate randomness. The desire to believe goes way back in evolutionary history…” (p. 258f) Garreau suggests that this may give us a clue about human nature. Maybe this tells us something about human nature. That we are patternseeking, storytelling animals. If one sees belief as reflecting a hardwired need for meaning and values, then perhaps in the Axial Age we filled the emptiness of our emerging consciousness with the highest aspirations for human nature we could possibly imagine. This raises the interesting question of whether we are due for a new Axial Age. If our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts, are we seeking a new era of sense, intelligibility, clarity, continuity and unity? If profound restatements of how the world works arose all over the planet the last time we had a transition on the scale of that from biological © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page37   evolution to cultural evolution, will it happen again as we move from cultural to technological evolution? (p. 259f) Garreau quotes Betty Sue Flowers who was the editor of The Power of Myth, the book by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers that accompanied the acclaimed PBS series by the same name. Flowers affirms, “This is a spiritual crisis. It’s not about science.” He references Martin E.P. Seligman who points out that there are three levels of human existence – the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life. The third form of happiness that is inevitably sought by humans is the pursuit of a meaningful life. “There is one thing we know about meaning,” says Seligman, “that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life. Aristotle said the two noblest professions are teaching and politics, and I believe that as well. Raising children, and projecting a positive human future through your children, is a meaningful form of life. Saving the whales is a meaningful form of life. Fighting in Iraq is a meaningful form of life. Being an Arab terrorist is a meaningful form of life. Notice this isn’t a distinction between good and evil. That’s not part of this. This isn’t a theory of everything. This is a theory of meaning, and the theory says, joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning… It’s impossible that there will be a drug for meaning, Seligman says. But if meaning suggests deploying your greatest strengths in the service of something you believe is larger than you – pursuing the infinite game – that would seem to go to the heart of the measure of The Prevail Scenario: increased human connections. (p. 261f) Garreau references Karen Armstrong again pointing to what is a dominant theme in her work – compassion. “Religion isn’t about believing things,” Armstrong says. “It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. It doesn’t really matter what you believe as long as it leads you to practical compassion. If your belief in a traditional God makes you come out imbued with a desire to feel with your fellow human beings, to make a place for them in your heart, to work to end suffering in the world, then it’s good.” Introducing compassion into the equation is at the core of meaning. “Without more kindliness in the world, technological power would mainly serve to increase man’s capacity to inflict harm on one another,” Bertrand Russell once wrote. Compassion may thus be at the core of successfully © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page38   managing transcendence – of coming up with a practical way to Prevail over the blind forces of change. (p. 262) In this context, Garreau reaches back to Kurzweil, the champion of The Heaven Scenario along with one more reference to Teilhard: “Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and more of other abstract and subtle attributes, such as love,” observes Ray Kurzweil. “And God has been called all these things, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward our conception of God, albeit never quite reaching this ideal. Thus the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form may be regarded as an essential spiritual quest.” “Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love,” writes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “And then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.” (p. 262) Garreau concludes by suggesting that perhaps we should create new rituals – maybe “a liturgy of life everlasting as a person receives her first cellular agereversing workup.” Will these rituals do any good? I don’t know. Do baptisms, marriages and funerals – sanctifying birth, copulation and death do any good? My experience says yes. At the very least they are celebrations of transformation where people cross barriers – barriers of class, gender, region, race and religion. They bring us together by officially marking and embracing critical moments. On these occasions, human connections that are rarely achieved elsewhere routinely occur. If we are embarking on a path in which we stand to transform ourselves more than at any brief period in our species’ time on earth, we are creating new critical moments. Perhaps we might start formally marking the occasions. If we did, inviting those we know from all walks of life and all levels of ability to these ceremonies, it would continue to knit together the fabrics of all the different kinds of human natures to come. It would be about creating the third happiness, the happiness of being part of something much larger than us. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page39   It would be about continuing to march up the ramp of human connectedness. That, after all, might just possibly be the ultimate transcendence. (p. 265) As I set forth the current human situation regarding the radical evolution we are experiencing, I think of it in terms of the biblical story. Garreau suggests quite rightly that the story we tell does not fit the facts. However, as the philosopher, Santayana, counseled, guard the story because it takes 2000 years to create a new one. And maybe the story still speaks if we can move beyond the ancient mythic form in which it comes, taken literally, and ask what questions those ancient writers were addressing. Take, for example, the story of the first temptation in the Garden of Eden recorded in Genesis 3: The First Sin and Its Punishment Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die’.” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. Is this really about snakes and apples? Isn’t it really about the potential and the limits of human knowledge? The biblical tradition in the Christian tradition speaks of this yielding to the temptation to seek knowledge as “The Fall”. The great English poet, John Milton, however, spoke of “the paradox of The Fortunate Fall.” Was not the ancient author perhaps expressing the very thing we have been occupied with – promise and peril of ever-expanding human knowing and taking under control the “building blocks” of Creation. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page40   Or, think of Psalm 8: Divine Majesty and Human Dignity O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; You have put all things under their feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Thinking of the human being in the midst of the majestic wonder of the cosmos, the writer recognizes our smallness, yet the reality is that it is precisely the human who is contemplating the cosmic miracle, and then goes on to affirm that we are made “a little lower than God”! The older King James version has “a little lower than the angels” perhaps drawing back from any reference to God. Quite an amazing affirmation of the human over two millennia ago. Finally, look to that final vision in the New Testament, The Revelation of Jesus Christ to John. It is a violent, bloody apocalyptic vision of the End. Yet it closes with a marvelous picture of The City of God – The New Jerusalem – coming down from God in Heaven, when tears will be wiped away and death will be no more. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University �Promise and Peril of Being Human Richard A. Rhem Page41   The New Heaven and the New Earth Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And, finally, in the final chapter, the moving vision of The City. The River of Life Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. From the Garden of Edenic bliss, through slings and arrows of human history to the City of God. That’s The Story. Maybe there is more there than meets the eye. Perhaps if we react to it with new eyes, it still fits the facts or gives room for them. References: Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human. New York: Doubleday, 2005. © 2013 Kaufman Interfaith Institute and Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Scripture Text Psalm 8, Genesis 3:1-7, Rev. 21:1-4, 22-25, 22:1-2 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution, 2005. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090809 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-08-09 Title A name given to the resource The Promise and Peril of Being Human Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 9, 2009 entitled "The Promise and Peril of Being Human", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Psalm 8, Genesis 3:1-7, Rev. 21:1-4, 22-25, 22:1-2. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Divine Mystery Emergence https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/5ab2f777d564f1e68c498a65235ccfd5.pdf 98f39a3fa54ed9e2cdd0523f84bf4931 PDF Text Text The Grace to Let Go Celebration of the Life of Sally Hammond Psalm 23, Mark 15:34, John 19:28-30, Luke 23:46 Richard A. Rhem Sally’s Garden Grand Haven, Michigan July 25, 2009 Prepared text of sermon Being a pastor to the Hammond family for so many years, it was only natural that I should have been on the e-mail list Tom assembled from the first. The list grew as the shocking news of Sally’s condition spread, but hearing the news from the first, I e-mailed Tom to say I was ready whenever they requested to come to them. A week or so later Tom called. They were ready for a pastoral visit and that afternoon Nancy and I went to them – Tom, Sally and Emily were there. From the first hug at the door I was aware that this was the right time. Sally took me to the big leather chair, sat me down, moved the foot stool aside and sat on it – literally at my knee. It was one of those moments when one senses something very special was going on. You might suspect that would have been a difficult call to make but it wasn’t at all. The five of us spoke candidly, openly, easily of Sally’s situation. We remembered so many great times – Tom and Sally twice accompanied Nancy and me on tours – once to Europe, once a New England Canadian cruise. And, of course, many years, wonderful years of shared moments at Christ Community Church. But there was no awkward avoidance of Sally’s dire physical condition. We spoke of the diagnosis and the prognosis and the decision Sally made to take no measure to deal with the cancer, methods that may have prolonged her life a bit but also robbed her of real life. It is always unwise to say what one would do if one were in that circumstance when, as a matter of fact, one is not in that circumstance. I did, however say to Sally I affirmed her decision and that I hoped were I in that circumstance, I would choose as she did. There was total agreement in that family circle. It was obvious that they were together at peace with the decision Sally made – to live as fully and normally as possible every remaining day she had. And she did! © Grand Valley State University   �The Grace To Let Go Richard A. Rhem Page 2   I know of no finer expression of Sally’s last day than the beautiful description from Tom’s final e-mail. Subject: Sally Update Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 22:16:54 Hi Dear Friends, Today I am writing to tell you that Sally passed away late last evening, not quite four weeks after discovering the tumor. During that time she dealt with everything with amazing dignity, humor, and love. This past Sunday we had one of the most amazing days I've ever experienced. She told us that she had decided that this was her last day and was very much at peace with it. She joined us on the porch in a rolling chair, weak but ate a lot of food, laughed a lot, reminisced. She was radiant, obviously having made the decision herself. We had very warm, fulfilling goodbyes. Later that night she slipped into a deep sleep, spent Monday in a coma, and passed quietly about midnight. We will always remember Sunday and the way she was. It was a real gift to us. I'm so thankful for Abby, Emily, Susan, and Betsy being here. They have been a real blessing. I'm also so thankful for all of you who have been so concerned; your love and caring have been greatly felt. Attached is the obituary that I wrote, then had the four girls improve. If you can be here on Saturday between 2 and 4, we would love to see you. Thanks again. Tom It was a gift; Sally turned tragedy into triumph. That’s why we are here today to celebrate her life amidst the gardens she loved – to celebrate her life. Strangely enough, not with a heavy cloud of darkness hanging over us, not with weeping but with stories, memories, laughing and crying but in it all a sense of celebration of a life whose presence graced us for so many years. Don’t misunderstand me. This is no denial of deep grief, of sadness, of painful loss. The whole point of my reflections is to say there was no denial here – not at the first news, not in the ensuing month, not at the final good-byes. And there will certainly be grief through which to work for Tom, the girls, the family. But grief laced with remembering the way she was, grief through gratitude at the gift she gave, grief through joy at the remarkable manner of her departure. © Grand Valley State University �The Grace To Let Go Richard A. Rhem Page 3   I’ve entitled my reflections, “The Grace To Let go.” She approached her end with dignity and departed with grace. Quite amazing really! Thinking about these moments I thought of some of Jesus’ words from the cross – My intention is not in any way to make the situation comparable; they are not. It did strike me however, that the words from the cross reflect the human reality of facing and coming to terms with our mortality when it faces us suddenly. For Jesus, the expression “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” That “why” is inevitable in our human situation – the feeling of being alone, abandoned – “My God, Why….?” But then the normal human physical response – “I’m thirsty.” Her last day she ate with the family – was it the last supper, her final communion? But then, inevitably, the awareness of the end comes – For Jesus, “It is finished.” And then finally, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” Tom writes: She had decided that this was her last day and was very much at peace with it. We had very warm, fulfilling good-byes. She slipped into a deep sleep – and passed quietly. It is finished…Father into your hands… I submit to you that Sally has modeled for us all the grace to let go and it is as beautiful as it is amazing. In our visit with Sally and family a couple weeks ago I suggested we stand in a circle holding hands and I offered a prayer. At the conclusion we hugged. She said “I’ve been waiting for that.” I sensed deeply that was the final notch and it brought deep peace. It was one of those rare moments when I knew it was not just I but rather all my person symbolized and embodied for her – It was a beautiful and deeply moving moment. And I knew anew the truth of what was a mantra at Christ Community: All will be well All will be well All manner of things will be well © Grand Valley State University �The Grace To Let Go Richard A. Rhem Page 4   The words of the 11th century Nun, Mystic, Julian of Norwich and to you all, family, friends, community – All will be well. Prayer O God! Somehow that address, that cry to the Sacred Mystery of our lives, of all of life, issues forth from our depths – O God! We come consciously into your Presence, for we come to the limit of our ability to fathom meaning and purpose, life’s sweetness and its vulnerability – indeed the beauty and the terror of creation, life’s wonder and its fragility. We come as a community surrounding Tom, Emily and Puya, Abby and Sally’s family in these moments, offering our love and care and support. We come acknowledging shock and sadness at the loss of this one, so vivacious, so full of fun, of life; our Sally! We can hardly take it in. And then we run into a paradox: How is it that such a great loss of one so young, so vibrant with dreams yet to be fulfilled does not bring with it a sense of tragedy and the blackness of despair? We have been telling Sally stories, we have laughed about shared moments, as we have remembered her mischievousness, her laughter, her humor, her kindness and goodness. Somehow today we cannot feel heavy of spirit, depressed or simply down. A paradox indeed! We do know why that is the case when we take a moment to reflect on the gift she was and the gift she bestowed on her beloved – the gift of living fully to the end with love and grace and dignity. The gift of facing so honestly and courageously her imminent death. Dear God, she was magnificent, a beautiful model of how to die. Such courage, such strength were not recent add-ons to her being but rather the lovely flowering of her nature, indeed, her soul. We celebrate that. We are in awe of our beloved Sally, loving wife, mother, sister, friend. In the quietness of these moments, We remember the way she was Grateful that the luminosity of her being has irradiated our own Grateful for this gift we’ve shared © Grand Valley State University �The Grace To Let Go Richard A. Rhem The human encounter Which has been divine Our Sally, in whose face we’ve seen the face of God. Even as she saw God in the face of Jesus Jesus who taught us to pray saying: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For Thine is the Kingdom and the power, and the glory, for ever. The love of God, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you now and forever. © Grand Valley State University Page 5   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Memorial Service for Sally Hammond Scripture Text Psalm 23, Mark 15:34, John 19:28-30, Luke 23:46 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090725 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-07-25 Title A name given to the resource The Grace to Let Go Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 25, 2009 entitled "The Grace to Let Go", on the occasion of Memorial Service for Sally Hammond, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Psalm 23, Mark 15:34, John 19:28-30, Luke 23:46. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Grace https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/a89ff2c209d2011a4c5679933926b06b.pdf 17e2b648758d4265f285a6af72917c99 PDF Text Text Just Imagine… Micah 6:8; Luke 10:25-37; John Lennon: “Imagine” Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan July 12, 2009 Having recently celebrated once again our nation’s independence, I have been reflecting on that founding vision in light of this present moment of our history. Let me state my intention up front: Being in awe of the miracle of the founding of these United States and of the vision upon which the nation was founded in the late 18th century, I will suggest that we need an equally radical and visionary declaration for the Age of Global Community into which we have entered. Let’s begin by remembering the miracle of our founding and of the vision that came to expression in our founding documents. Specifically, let me remind you of the creation of our Constitution which is so much under discussion today because of the peril into which it has been placed in this era of American imperial designs. In May 1787, 55 delegates from twelve of the thirteen states gathered in Philadelphia for a Constitutional Convention. The heady days of 1776 and newly won independence had finally been ratified in the Peace of Paris in 1783, but that newly won independence was by now severely strained. The new nation was a confederacy of sovereign states – thirteen sovereign states –not altogether unlike the present European Confederation bound together for purposes of trade. A confederacy is a weak instrument and the respective state legislatures wanted it to stay that way. States rights were the first concern, especially among the more numerous small states that feared being swallowed up by the larger states of Virginia, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. Each state was jealous of their own sovereignty, and without a common enemy to fight, Americans seemed incapable of preserving their union. “Lycurgus,” a pseudonomous writer in the New Haven Gazette, complained that the union under the Articles of Confederation “is not a union of sentiment – it is not a union of interest; – it is not a union to be seen – or felt – or in any manner perceived.” Antifederalists believed that the preservation of republican liberties won by the Revolution depended on maintaining the sovereignty and independence of the States. John Francis Mercer spoke for the Antifederalists when he declared that he was “persuaded © Grand Valley State University   �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 2   that the People of so large a continent, so different in interests, so distinct in habits,” could not be adequately represented in a single legislature. Patrick Henry, the great orator of the Revolution, would have nothing to do with a central government; Virginia was doing just fine. There were other voices, however, representing a larger vision. George Washington came out of retirement to participate in the Convention, becoming its chairman. James Madison clearly articulated the urgency and critical importance of a strong federal government, warning that, without it, the 13 states simply would not survive. Indeed, in Europe there was little confidence that the fledgling nation would survive and Britain, France and Spain were simply waiting in the wings to move in. The initial years of independence were a sorry tale of weakness and incapacity to govern. Only that authority freely given by the States to the Confederate government could be exercised. There was no power to enact legislation or impose taxes. In the summer of 1786 farmers in western Massachusetts determined to shut down the courts that were threatening foreclosure on their lands due to unpaid taxes. Shays’ rebellion, as it was called, shocked the nation. The impossibility of governing under the present structure was recognized and a Constitutional Convention was called for May of 1787. One month before the Convention, Madison said the hurdles confronting any reform (of the Articles of Confederation) were so great that they “would inspire despair in any case where the alternative was less formidable.” The Convention was called for May 14; it actually began May 25 and serious discussion got underway on May 29. With only one recess, the Convention met for six days a week from 4 to 8 hours a day until September 17, when the document was signed. It was a steamy, hot, humid summer in Philadelphia. One breath followed another with difficulty. Windows had to be kept closed because of the swarms of stinging flies. Madison arrived eleven days early, drafting the Virginia Plan which became the Convention agenda. The smaller states were threatened and unyielding. On June 14, William Paterson of New Jersey submitted the New Jersey Plan as an alternative move to the Virginia Plan, more to the liking of the smaller states. The Convention deadlocked. A committee was appointed to work out a compromise which was offered on July 5, debated until July 14 and finally affirmed on July 16. The compromise was approved by a five to four vote. From then on it was a matter of working out the details. By September 17, our Constitution was signed, ready to be ratified by the respective states. © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 3   Madison was disappointed. He felt that he had lost on critical issues. It fell to Ben Franklin, 81, the wise, elder statesman, to present the document for signing. He said, When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudice, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded like those of the Builders of Babel… Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. Franklin had himself made compromise. He asked that “every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility.” The Constitution of the United States is an amazing document that has served us well and has become a model for nations around the globe. Someone has said it is our most important export. What this document, hammered out in the oppressive heat of a Philadelphia summer, has created and enabled is the highest achievement of human government. Reviewing that history, I was surprised at how tenuous was the establishing of this nation. It was a struggle – a hard-fought battle. Not everyone wanted to be free of the British Crown and, of those who did, there were many who had no vision for the great nation that emerged. We were almost not birthed. That we were was quite miraculous; that there were such leaders of the caliber of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin and others was quite amazing; and, their vision of the principles upon which our nation is founded, which came to expression in our founding documents, is really amazing. Admittedly we have fallen short of the vision and the visionaries themselves had blind spots. Nonetheless, in Franklin’s words to the Constitutional Convention regarding the Document to be voted on – I consent…to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best. I suspect we would all agree that his estimate was right. This nation was born at the dawn of the modern period. The periodization of history is somewhat arbitrary, I suppose, but most scholars would agree that the 18th century was the blossoming of modernity – the Age of Enlightenment – the Age of Reason. It saw © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 4   the ascendancy of the human spirit – that was the historical context in which our nation was born. The human spirit began to come to flower in the fifteenth century, and in the Italian Renaissance there was a great expression of art, of sculpture, and of architecture. After that long period of medievalism when the Church was so dominant and so oppressive, where there was linkage between throne and altar, finally, in the fifteenth century, there was a breaking out, a blossoming of the human spirit. I think the sixteenth century of which we are the children – children of the Reformation and the counter-reformation – was perhaps a detour. For a time the authoritarian structures of society once again asserted themselves. But inevitably the human person was going to break out. Our nation was born in that context of history when all forms of authoritarianism were overthrown. There was the assertion of the human spirit. There was the conviction that there was dignity in every human person and that freedom and liberty were the Godgiven and God-intended virtues with which the human being and society were to live. So our nation was born at a point of newness. In the midst of history there is development. There is newness. Sometimes we get so depressed by the present. It seems as though things don’t go anywhere and we get all enmeshed, and in a situation of no movement, of gridlock. We throw up our hands and we wonder if there’s any hope, and if anyone can make any difference, if anyone can change things, if anyone can get things moving again. What I want to say to you is “Yes. Yes. Yes, in the long run there is movement. There is development.” This nation was born at a point of newness. There was a new understanding of human government. There was a new understanding of the human person. There was an appreciation for the necessity of liberty and freedom in which human beings could realize their potential. There was a recognition that the finest form of human government was the government that governed least, that was a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” in that definition that Lincoln gave to this form of government 100 years later in the crisis of the Civil War. Lincoln really redefined the revolution when he said that this nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal,” and that the test of the Civil War was a test of whether or not this experiment indeed could come to fruition and realization of that high ideal for which it was initiated in the first place. The twentieth century saw our nation engaged in great global conflict in which our philosophy of government, our conception of freedom, of democratic institutions, of the rule of law, have been severely challenged. World War I, World War II and, following victory in the Second World War, the decades of the Cold War’s ideological struggle in which the world was brought to the brink of disaster – each side keeping its hand off the trigger, because of the realization that in nuclear conflict there can be no winners. Mutually Assured Destruction, © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 5   aptly named by the acronym MAD, kept the world “safe” during the decades of Cold War standoff. And then 1989 – do you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall – people dancing, singing, weeping, embracing. Do you remember the euphoria? In the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest an essay appeared that created a great deal of discussion. It was written by a State Department planner, Francis Fukayama, who boldly entitled his essay “The End of History.” Fukuyama saw in the reform policies of Gorbachev not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such – that is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. He argued that Karl Marx saw history as having an “end,” meaning its fulfillment in an ideal political system. Marx saw the conflicts and contradictions of all previous societies being resolved in a utopian classless society. According to Fukuyama, Marx borrowed the idea from the German philosopher Hegel who argued that history would culminate at a moment “in which a final rational form of society and state became victorious”. According to the report of Fukayama’s essay in Time (9/4/89), For Hegel, history “ended,” in this sense, with Napoleon’s triumph over the Prussian forces at Jena in 1806. That battle, to Hegel, marked the vindication by arms of the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. A French-Russian philosopher, Alexander Kojeve, believes Hegel was right because at Jena the “vanguard” of humanity implemented the French Revolution’s goals. The motto of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” has been seriously challenged in this century but Fukuyama argued the ferment occurring within the Eastern bloc points to the triumph of these ideals. You can imagine that Fukuyama’s contention met with serious criticism at the time. In a series of responses printed in the same issue of The National Interest there were challenges raised to his thesis. One respondent, Gertrude Himmelfarb, pointed to a different reading of Hegel. In another reading of Hegel, however, all of history is a constant – and constantly unfulfilled – attempt to realize and actualize those principles. The dialectic does not consist, as Mr. Fukuyama says, in “a beginning, a middle, and an end,” but in “a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis,” in which the synthesis of the preceding stage is the thesis of the present, thus setting in motion an endless dialectical cycle – and thus preserving the drama of history. © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Hegel was an Idealist, not a utopian. It was Marx, having defined history as the history of class struggle and socialism as the abolition of classes, who had to contemplate a final, classless state of history – although even he was enough of a Hegelian to be uncomfortable with that end, avoiding any discussion of it except for a few hilarious sentences in The German Ideology (very early Marx) about the completely fulfilled, de-alienated man who would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and “criticize” (philosophize) in the evening. As it happened, history did not come to an end either with the French Revolution or, as Marxists once believed, with the Russian Revolution. A good deal of history transpired between and since those revolutions – not only the humdrum “panorama” of ordinary history (as Hegel called it) but momentous, world-historical events. Even the most ardent Hegelian would be hard put to dismiss communism or nazism as minor set-backs in the relentless march of history; he might even be moved to see in them dimensions of human consciousness, potentialities for evil, which bode ill for the progress of Spirit or Reason. At the very least, he might be inclined to put off the end of history to infinity, making it an Absolute by which to judge the present, a star by which to steer our course, but with no expectation of reaching that final destination. I entirely agree with Mr. Fukuyama’s opening sentence, that “something very fundamental has happened in world history.” My only problem is with the rest of the paper, in which liberal democracy is universalized and eternalized, bringing history to an end. Would that it were so. I myself have been too traumatized by communism and nazism to have any confidence in the eternal realities of history – except the reality of contingency and change, of the imponderable and the unanticipated ªand, as often as not, the undesired and undesirable. The twenty years since 1989 have proved Himmelfarb far closer to reality than Fukuyama, and that not because the values and virtues of western liberal democracy are less than they are heralded to be but rather because even the best political and economic framework and principles can be wrenched and wrecked by human hubris, greed and ruthlessness. Witness the present economic chaos in which we find ourselves, broken government bought and paid for by special interests, a designation pointing to the fact that the common good, the public wellbeing, is not the goal. In the July, 2009, issue of Vanity Fair, there appears an article entitled “Wall Street’s Toxic Message” under which appear the following in bold print: When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating – not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 7   nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security. Interestingly, Stiglitz refers to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, obviously agreeing with Fukuyama that that was a pivotal moment in our times. The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are selfcorrecting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly. The consequence of the implosion of free market capitalism and the economic meltdown in the global community may lead developing nations to turn away from market capitalism which he contends is the only system that can bring them prosperity and free them from poverty. He writes, But my concern here is more with the realm of ideas. I worry that, as they see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions. A few countries – and maybe America itself – will learn the right lessons. They will realize that what is required for success is a regime where the roles of market and government are in balance, and where a strong state administers effective regulations. They will realize that the power of special interests must be curbed. But, for many other countries, the consequences will be messier, and profoundly tragic. The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy has failed, and is indeed unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 8   of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism – we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But the poor will suffer again under these new regimes, which will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. Poverty feeds disaffection. The inevitable downturns, hard to manage in any case, but especially so by governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism, will lead to more poverty. The consequences for global stability and American security are obvious. Stiglitz sees our present failure as putting the democracy birthed here in a bad light. Faith in democracy is another victim. In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy – and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the American system of democracy. After they have seen all this, it is but a short stop to conclude that something is fatally wrong, and inevitably so, with democracy itself. (p. 85) Finally he returns to Fukuyama, pointing to where he was wrong but also where he was right. The American economy will eventually recover, and so, too, up to a point, will our standing abroad. America was for a long time the most admired country in the world, and we are still the richest. Like it or not, our actions are subject to minute examination. Our successes are emulated. But our failures are looked upon with scorn. Which brings me back to Francis Fukuyama. He was wrong to think that the forces of liberal democracy and the market economy would inevitably triumph, and that there could be no turning back. But he was not wrong to believe that democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world. The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. Perhaps it is true that the world is heading toward the end of history, but it is now sailing against the wind, on a course we set ourselves. (p. 85) I wrestle with a subject like this, way beyond my pay scale, which is to say my level of competence, because finally as a follower of Jesus it is my passion to see a movement toward a more compassionate world. We began with the marvelous vision with which this nation was founded. We rightly stand in awe of humane © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page 9   values which came to expression in our founding documents. Every Fourth of July we celebrate the Declaration of our Independence. But history moves on. John Donne wrote “No man is an island entire of itself,” but today we must recognize no nation is an island entire of itself. If anyone doubted the intimate inter-connection of all the peoples of the earth, the present economic disaster should remove all doubt. Pope Benedict XVI issued his third encyclical since assuming the throne of St. Peter. The encyclical dealt with global economic order, urging world leaders to work for the common good. In an article in the New York Times (July 8, 2009), it was reported that he addressed the current situation: VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing a growing divide between rich and poor and urging the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good.” He criticized the current economic system, “where the pernicious effects of sin are evident,” and urged financiers in particular to “rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.” He also called for “greater social responsibility” on the part of business. “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty,” Benedict wrote in his new encyclical, which the Vatican released on Tuesday. More than two years in the making, “Caritas in Veritate,” or “Charity in Truth,” is Benedict’s third encyclical since he became pope in 2005. Filled with terms like “globalization,” “market economy,” “outsourcing,” “labor unions” and “alternative energy,” it is not surprising that the Italian media reported that the Vatican was having difficulty translating the 144-page document into Latin. This is an important call to recognize and face up to the imperative necessity of the global community beginning to act according to the reality into which history has evolved. Many will write off the Pope’s call as just another religious idealist peddling pipe dreams. Such an international authority will be struggled against no more fiercely anywhere than in our own nation. Why yield any element of sovereignty when you are number one – even if crippled and losing ground. But the time is coming when a radical new envisioning of our global community will occur if the human story is to continue. But why should we wait until there is no option because of disaster? Why should we wait for the environment to collapse, endless war, and greedy, ruthless © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page10   operatives to amass fortunes while of the 80% of the world’s population that live in Asia, Latin America and Africa, 1.4 billion subsist on less than $1.25 a day? It is not that no voices have been raised over the centuries, voices of prophets, poets and dreamers. The biblical tradition is replete with calls for justice and compassion. From the Hebrew prophet Micah, for example, He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, and love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8) And Jesus, the great storyteller, answered a lawyer’s test question: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” by asking him, “What is written in the Law? What do you read there?” The lawyer responded with the summary of the Law and the prophets – You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. Jesus affirmed the answer and said, “Do this, and you will live.” But that didn’t satisfy the lawyer whose motive in asking the question is suspect and he asked further, “And who is my neighbor?” And that question of course led to one of Jesus’ most memorable parables, the story of the good Samaritan, (Luke 10:25-37). A man journeying from Jerusalem to Jericho is ambushed, robbed, beaten and left half dead. A priest saw him and passed by on the other side. A Levite did the same. Then a Samaritan came by, saw the wounded one, had compassion on him, gave him first aid and then brought him to an inn where he took care of him. Leaving the next day, he told the Innkeeper to look after him and upon his return he would cover the cost. Now in response to the lawyer’s question “Who is my neighbor?”, Jesus asks the lawyer, “Which of the three was neighbor to the victim?” The answer, of course, was obvious: “The one who showed him kindness.” Jesus replied, “Go and do likewise.” The story gets its punch, of course, because while religious leaders might be expected to show compassion they fail to act. The one who shows mercy is a Samaritan, one despised by the Jews, reflecting an ancient feud. Showing mercy knows no bounds. So it is on planet Earth. A striking image of our real planetary situation was expressed by the famed astronomer, Carl Sagan – no professor of belief in God. © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page11   “We succeeded in taking that picture (from deep space), and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined selfimportance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Carl Sagan Can you hear that and not be moved? Is it not compassion we need and would the deep wellspring of compassion that lies within the human breast be tapped if we had such a vision, such a grasp of the reality of our human situation? If only we could imagine…. In case you missed the news, Michael Jackson is dead. I acknowledge some lack in myself but I could never get into him or his music. But I know it has to do with some deficiency; I never got into the Beatles either. In both cases it was I against the universe I guess. Certainly there is musical genius that I have missed. I confess this because a few Christmases past we received a Christmas card with a poem by John Lennon entitled “Imagine” as well as a variation on the theme that transposed the poem from an amazing expression of human imagination to an expression of Christmas hope. The original is: © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page12   Imagine By John Lennon Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today…. Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for No religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace… Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world… You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one. The Christmas card version from our friends Peter and Helen Hart was entitled “Imagine Reversed…” Imagine there’s a heaven It’s easy if you try When love is all around us And beauty fills the sky Imagine all the people Living for today…. Imagine all the countries It isn’t hard to do The rule of law to guide us And religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace… © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page13   Imagine our possessions I wonder if you can As gifts for need and hunger According to God’s plan Imagine all the people Sharing all the world… Our hope is not just dreaming For once was born a Son Who lived so we might follow Him And the world will be as one. Obviously for Christmas, for a Christian, Lennon’s expression is inadequate. It was a telling critique of religion, I must say, suggesting religion is one of the divisive elements in the human world, indeed a source of violence which cannot be denied. But it need not be and the positive potential of religion is picked up nicely in the “Imagine Reversed”. If you look closely at “Imagine Reversed,” the last two lines of all four stanzas are the same with the exception of the fourth stanza where the next to the last line is changed from “I hope some day you’ll join us” to “Who lived so we might follow Him.” Rather than an invitation to join the dreamer the reverse version points to a concrete human example, obviously the one whose birth Christmas celebrates. A not insignificant change from an open invitation to join in a human hope to a human life as model that incarnated the dreamer’s vision. Even so, Lennon’s original is a marvelous portrayal of an alternative world envisioned by a dreamer. Dreamers and poets are critically important to inspire us to imagine, to imagine a better way of being, to imagine a better world, an alternative world reflective of the God of love and compassion – not just for our nation, not for one continent, not for one race but for all humankind. Just imagine, All people living for today Living life in peace Sharing all the world And the world will be as one. I am quite aware that that sounds like fantasy talk – wholly unrealistic in the present world situation. Where would you begin to point out the flash points of present – the Middle East – Iran? Iraq? The Israeli-Palestinian ongoing crises? Afghanistan with escalating military engagement? The straining of relationships with Russia? Honduras? North Korea? The volatility of Pakistan? Spin the globe and peril seems ubiquitous. One might be tempted to throw up one’s hands and say hope of any amelioration of the world’s peril, the struggle for power and © Grand Valley State University �Just Imagine… Richard A. Rhem Page14   preeminence, the exploitation of the weaker by the stronger has always been the story and will be until the End – an end some religious traditions might see as the final intervention of God in Judgment and Redemption. Or might it be an End that is of human making – a nuclear Holocaust or an environmental disaster? And in the meantime conflict, violence, war and human suffering and tragedy. Gathered here as an assembly of good people, the fortunate ones, civil, decent and essentially well-meaning, it must feel like I am overdrawing the threat and painting the picture far too somberly. After all there have been wars and rumors of wars forever. There have been good times and bad times. Isn’t it better to try just to do one’s best and get along as best one can? Is our time really different? Has everything changed? Albert Einstein in the wake of the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan – He whose genius was critical in creating the atomic weapon – said “Everything has changed except our thinking.” And the world Einstein knew has changed dramatically in the meantime. He also said, “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” In The Abolition of Man (1944), C.S. Lewis wrote: Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall … be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. The only hope for a human future as well as a humane future is to imagine an alternative universe in which a global community learns compassion. As Jesus taught us to pray Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. That will be the case when we learn that our neighbor is anyone who crosses our path in need and we allow compassion to flow like a mighty stream. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Scripture Text Micah 6:8, Luke 10:25-37, Imagine by John Lennon Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090712 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-07-12 Title A name given to the resource Just Imagine... Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 12, 2009 entitled "Just Imagine...", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Micah 6:8, Luke 10:25-37, Imagine by John Lennon. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Inclusivism Nonviolence https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/fe12176309734f9516a0b7edc2ba590c.pdf 425adf29020eb07917859042f281f354 PDF Text Text Can the Eagle and the Dove Fly Together? A Reflection on the Way of Jesus and a Nation’s Imperial Designs Matthew 5:38-48; Luke 4:6 – 21; Acts 1: 1-11; 2: 1-3 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan Memorial Day Weekend, May 24, 2009 Were we to celebrate Memorial Day on the date originally set for its observance – May 30 – rather than as we observe it in 2009, May 25, it would be followed immediately by the Festival of Pentecost which in 2009 is Sunday, May 31, a week from today. The conjunction of these two observances is not always in such close proximity since on the Christian calendar, Easter is a movable feast which means it is not tied to a specific date as was Memorial Day originally – May 30. A movable feast, as its name implies, moves to different dates; it falls in the western church on the Sunday following the paschal full moon, which is the full moon that falls on or after the vernal, or Spring, equinox. However, it occurs often enough around mid-April that over many years of setting up a preaching schedule and liturgical themes, I am acutely aware of the conjoining of the observance of Pentecost and Memorial Day. Why do I say “acutely aware”? That takes me back quite a few years – one of those years when the Sunday service was Pentecost on the Christian Calendar and, the following day, the Memorial Day observance which, of course, would be observed in the church on the Sunday before – in this case, Pentecost Sunday. Being considerably younger and a bit naïve, I assumed we should observe Pentecost, one of the major festivals of the Christian calendar – the observance we marked as the birthday of the Church. The Festival of the Holy Spirit was a lively celebration – the liturgical color was red and the people were encouraged to wear red apparel. The music was celebratory, often there were liturgical dancers and the whole service was upbeat. It was the culmination of the Christian year – a six-month remembering and rehearsal of the life of Jesus, the Anointed One, or the Christ. My naiveté was revealed in the fact that I assumed such a full and rich observance of a high holy day ruled out any notice of the national observance of Memorial Day. That omission gave great offence to some and I heard about it. Even now, in my fading awareness in this the springtime of my senility, I remember the name and face of one dear woman who was deeply offended. © Grand Valley State University   �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 2   In all honesty, I was totally unaware that there might be such a reaction. It simply did not occur to me that the celebration of Pentecost in the Church should be wedded to a national celebration. But I’m a quick study. Ever after, when the two observances fell on the same weekend, Pentecost was central but Memorial Day got notice in the hymns – the National Hymn, for example, and in the prayers. I didn’t want to face the wrath of the patriot again. I compromised. I set this before you because it strikes me as a very great irony that a national holiday of remembrance of a nation’s war dead should rival the celebration of one of the most significant days on the church calendar – the Festival of the Holy Spirit. The national symbol is the eagle; the symbol of the Spirit is the dove. I raise the question: can the eagle and the dove fly together? Or, perhaps, more fittingly, is there place in the religious community, in my case the Christian community, for the spirit of patriotism and nationalism? To state the issue from another angle, how is it that the religion that issued from Jesus has become the majority religion of a nation bent on empire, on global domination? How are empires created? Is it not finally by military power? How are empires perpetuated? Is it not by military power? What marks empires during their time of dominance? Is it not fear? Aware always of any threat to that dominance, must not an empire be ever on the alert? Must it not be quick to recognize any challenge? Must it not scan the horizon for any rising power? Must it not keep its weapon systems up to date? Must it not be watchful of unrest anywhere that might explode into widespread conflagration? Is it not an irony that a so-called Christian nation – though that claim should be challenged – should have imperial designs when the one we purportedly follow called his followers to love and not to fear. As one of the New Testament writers put it succinctly: God is love. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. This has been a trigger for much broader reflection on the relationship of religious vision and nationalism. In my religious faith commitment as a Christian, specifically as one who would follow the Way of Jesus, increasingly I see a great tension between American imperial designs and that Way to which Jesus beckons me. It is really a luxury to be retired, not to have to worry about institutional concerns, about membership rolls or budget matters. I have been a “late bloomer” and that is probably a good thing because my ongoing – what I hope is a deepening – grasp of the Gospel – the Way of Jesus – creates a growing tension in me as an American citizen and a follower of Jesus. © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 3   That calls for clarification. Let me be clear; I do love this nation. I see the American experience as one of the great human achievements. I value our democratic values, our freedom, our constitutional vision and the rule of law. And I understand as well the emotional ties that bind us together in national vision and purpose. I remember December 7, 1941. I had two brother-in-laws who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and I remember my sisters who lived at home writing their husbands every evening and watching anxiously for the mailman. I remember the boyfriend of my youngest sister who was rejected for the draft because of a heart murmur and I remember he was depressed. My father told him he should be thankful but he regretted the fact that he could not enter the struggle for his country. I remember the flag that hung in the sanctuary of our church with a star for every serviceman. I remember celebrating in the street V-E Day and V-J Day. I remember, too, the small flags in the windows of homes where a son or daughter was off to war and sometimes a gold star because a son or daughter had been killed in action. I do have some sense of how all of that national emotional experience takes on an aura of the sacred. Deeply felt experience of national existence is similar it seems to deeply felt spiritual experience and I’m quite certain for most ardent observers of this national holiday there is no sense of it being in any way in tension with whatever religious faith they possess. I hope that sets the context for that upon which I invite you to ponder with me – that is, the tension involved in being a follower of Jesus and being a citizen of an imperial power. As I mentioned above, retirement is a luxury for one can set forth one’s thinking honestly, without the trustees nervously suggesting that one might be jeopardizing the institution. But it is even more than that. In my present situation I have no desire to make points, to persuade, convince, convert. And, God knows, I don’t feel compelled to be right, to win an argument. Were I really wise, I would love to be a sage – one who engages others in thoughtful discourse to raise awareness and enable another to think critically about issues and come to deeper understanding, thus enriching their humanity. To set out the tension of the Kingdom of God as embodied in Jesus and Imperial America, I will suggest that for both the church and the nation there has been a serious shift from their founding vision. Let me begin with the Way of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel, leading to the Pentecost moment, and, three hundred © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 4   years later, the establishment of the Christian religion as the official religion of the Empire in the days of Emperor Constantine. The Way of Jesus set forth in the Gospels Obviously I will be able to deal with only a very limited Gospel reference, but for our purpose here, I would suggest the references I have selected are critical passages. First, from the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel: Concerning Retaliation 38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ 39 But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; 40 and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; 41 and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. 42 Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘ You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”(Matthew 5: 38 – 48) Without attempting an in-depth analysis of this “turning the other cheek” paragraph it is obvious that Jesus is calling his disciples to reject absolutely the principle of retaliatory violence. The next paragraph is a call to love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute one – the model being God who makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain alike on the gardens of the righteous and on the unrighteous. With that as the Heavenly Parent’s example, Jesus calls on his followers to act accordingly, thereby being perfect “as your heavenly Father is perfect.” That word “perfect” needs a word of explanation. The Greek word is teleios from telos which means “end.” End can mean point of termination, cessation, the last part or conclusion. But it can also mean the end as a goal, or the purpose of something, the intention, the aim of an action, the outcome of an endeavor, the destiny which awaits. If one takes these lexical meanings, one might better translate teleios in this context as “mature”. Then Jesus would be calling his followers to emulate God in living and acting maturely as God acts maturely, transcending our natural human responses in our human interactions. © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 5   I chose to cite Matthew rather than the same teaching from Luke’s Gospel because Matthew changes the final call to emulate the heavenly Father from “merciful” to “perfect” or, as I am suggesting, “mature” or “whole”. The source behind this teaching in both Matthew and Luke is a source called “Q” and the word in the “Q” source is the Greek word for “merciful.” Luke keeps it; Matthew changes it and, for the point I am attempting to make, I resonate with the word teleios with the sense of maturity as the realizing of the end for which we were created – a realization that comes by loving, for love alone transforms the human being and the human situation. The New Interpreter’s Bible commentary on Matthew (Vol. VIII, p. 198) has, I believe, helpful comments on the paragraph. Although not given on an institutional level (Jesus does not legislate for worldly courts) but for the private lives of disciples, these commands still have implications for the involvement of these private lives in the public and political decisions for which Christians are responsible. These sayings indicate that Jesus himself must have resisted the militaristic tendencies of those who opposed Rome and who finally plunged the nation into a catastrophic war (66-70 CE). In preserving these sayings and making them the climax of his antitheses, Matthew takes his stand with those who had resisted the catastrophic attempt at a “military solution,” which he and his church had lived through. None of this is a matter of strategy. To turn the other cheek is not to shame the opponent or win him or her over, to cause the enemy to repent. Going the extra mile is not a matter of prudence calculated to keep a low profile when you do not have power and need to “get along.” These sayings express the inherent rule of the kingdom of God, are God’s ultimate way of dealing with humanity exhibited in the life and death of Jesus, who went to the cross. All such hermeneutical considerations are not a matter of watering them down, finding a meaning that does seem reasonable and with which we can live. They are not to be made “reasonable,” for they violate the “common sense” of this world and point to another reality. They ask us whether we are oriented to the God who has redefined power and kingship in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. That last sentence is precisely how I have come to understand the Sermon on the Mount and the imperatives of Jesus – are we “oriented to the God who has redefined power and kingship in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth?” Let me reinforce this view as Jesus’ own self-understanding as Luke presents the story of Jesus. Luke, in the most familiar and best-loved presentation of Jesus’ birth has angels singing, Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace, goodwill among people. © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 6   In the fourth chapter Jesus endures the wilderness temptation which is, in itself, a subject worth study as it seems Luke’s intention to say that Jesus had to choose wisely and be resolute in the means and manner of the execution of his ministry. Returning, Luke tells us, from that bout with temptation, he, filled with God’s Spirit, comes to his hometown, Nazareth, where he is invited to read the scripture in his family synagogue. He reads from the prophet Isaiah (chpt. 42:1f). Luke 4:16f reads, “When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” If you go to the passage Jesus read on that occasion you will find Jesus breaks off with the words “the year of the Lord’s favor” and stops mid-sentence for the text of Isaiah 61:2 goes on: “and the day of vengeance of our God.” As I said above, this is Luke’s picture of Jesus, Jesus’ self-understanding as Luke understood it. Luke’s ending with “the year of the Lord’s favor”, rather than continuing with “and the day of the vengeance of our God” cannot have been an accident. That brief description of Jesus’ ministry was one of grace and healing, fully in accord with the passage from Matthew – the call to emulate God in love even of the enemy. Again it is Luke who has Jesus speak from the cross the word of forgiveness full of grace, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing”, even as he was being crucified. A moment that never fails to fill me with awe. Move now to the end of Luke’s story – post-Easter. After forty days he tells us in his second volume, The Acts of the Apostles, Jesus leads the disciples out to Bethany where he blesses them and is “carried up into heaven.” And that is where © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 7   the Acts of the Apostles takes up the story. In chapter 1 he counsels them to remain in Jerusalem where not many days hence, they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. But in the Acts account the disciples ask an all-important question: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the Kingdom to Israel?” That, of course, was Luke’s question in the 70’s and 80’s C.E. There is a scholarly debate about whether the apocalyptic passages of the gospel reflect Jesus’ own understanding. I tend to side with, for example, Marcus Borg and Dominic Crossan who do not believe Jesus was awaiting the apocalyptic coming of God’s Kingdom in which the wicked would be damned and the righteous vindicated as the rule of God comes to earth in God’s dramatic action. And I think Luke told the story of Jesus in which Jesus understood the Kingdom as present already in his ministry. Reading the Isaiah passage he claims, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And, again in his telling of the story he has Jesus respond to the question raised by the disciples, but here raised by the Pharisees: “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, the Kingdom of God is not coming with things than can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ’There it is.’ For, in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you.” (Luke 17: 20-21) Another possible reading is “The Kingdom is within you.” But to return to the disciples’ question, Jesus responds, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” With that, Jesus is lifted up in a cloud taking him out of their sight. And Chapter 2 opens: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them the ability.” Such is Luke’s story of Jesus, beginning with his birth, his crucifixion at the time of the Jewish Feast of Passover, resurrection after three days, a forty-day earthly sojourn post-Easter during which there are various appearances and then, ten days later on the Jewish feast of Pentecost, the Baptism with the Holy Spirit. © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 8   As for the question of the Kingdom’s arrival, Jesus says it is not yours to know but Luke answers the question such that there is to be a period of apostolic witness and his Acts of the Apostles is centered mostly in the missionary work of Paul whose story he tells, the story ending with Paul under house arrest in Rome continuing to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom that arrived with Jesus. Through principally Paul’s ministry the Gospel was preached throughout the Roman Empire and churches were founded in the metropolitan centers of the empire. The Jesus movement that began as a Jewish movement found a ready hearing in the Gentile world. That whole history and the Jewish-Gentile tension is another story. But the spread of that early Jesus movement was quite amazing so that three hundred years later the Christian religion had moved from being a persecuted cult to being the lone established religion of the Roman Empire. That too is a story I cannot go into only to say that the Constantinian establishment carried with it great peril for the Christian movement. Imperial recognition carried with it the danger of imperial control. In his first volume of a trilogy Christian Theology in a North American Context, Douglas John Hall writes, One consequence of the establishment for Christian thought has already been alluded to: the emphasis on oneness or unity (the ecumenical or catholic dimension) could never be regarded in purely theological terms after the adoption of the faith by imperial Rome. For now it was bound up with quite specific political aspirations and concepts. When we confess belief in “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” in the Nicene Creed, it is well to remember that fact. On precisely such grounds, Theodosius outlawed all forms of Christianity but the ‘Catholic’ (i.e., the imperially recognized majority) form, at the same time (394 C.E.) as he outlawed the non-Christian religions. Unity, under the conditions of Constantinianism, is defined by secular authority and/or standards of assessment, and it is therefore likely to mean something closer to uniformity than to the oneness for which Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 17). A still more provocative consequence of the establishment for the theology of the church is implied with the mention of Nicaea. Both the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451) took place under the conditions of Christian establishment. Concretely this means: the church’s doctrinal decisions about (a) the nature of the Godhead (that God is triune) and (b) the person of Jesus (that he is God and man in one historical person) were taken by a church which now conceived itself in the role of official cult to the empire. Indeed, Nicaea was convened by Constantine personally, with the express purpose of putting a stop to Christian differences which could only further divide an already disunited empire. The decisions arrived at in these two pivotal councils were to determine orthodoxy in © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page 9   Theology and Christology up to and including our own time. This is a staggering observation, and from our present perspective we must ask: How would it have influenced the Christian church’s conception of God, and even more explicitly its Christology, if decisions in these key areas of belief had evolved under the conditions of diaspora and persecution rather than those of establishment? In his The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan cites the early Christian historian, Eusebius (Vita Constantine, 3.15): It is hard, indeed, not to get very, very nervous in reading this description of the imperial banquet celebrating the Council of Nicaea’s conclusion: Detachments of the body-guard and troops surrounded the entrance of the palace with drawn swords, and through the midst of them the men of God proceeded without fear into the innermost of the Imperial apartments, in which some were the Emperor’s companions at table, while others reclined on couches arranged on either side. One might have thought that a picture of Christ’s kingdom was thus shadowed forth, and a dream rather than reality. (Eusebius, Vita Constantini 3.15; Brown 1982:16) The meal and the Kingdom still come together, but now the participants are the male bishops, and they recline, with the Emperor himself, to be served by others. Maybe, Christianity is an inevitable and absolutely necessary ‘betrayal” of Jesus, else it might all have died among the hills of Lower Galilee. But did that “betrayal” have to happen so swiftly, succeed so fully, and be enjoyed so thoroughly? Might not a more even dialectic have been maintained between Jesus and Christ in Jesus Christ? Hall sees this danger worked out in the Protestant Church: Protestantism has preferred to limp through most of its history following two paths, ultimately divergent; the path of political quietism or noninterference, and that of personal piety. The cross could sometimes be a meaningful symbol for the latter, but not for the former. Protestantism as the favored religion of Northern European states and their missionary offshoots has been obliged and content to hide even from itself the critical political and social implications of its theology of the cross. (Confessing the Faith, p. 209) Let me suggest that in the establishment of the Christian religion as the official faith of Imperial Rome may be the loss of the Way of Jesus and the ascending of the High Christology that was defined in the Nicene Creed of 325 C.E. and the Chalcedonian Formula of 451 C.E. With those creedal definitions of Jesus as God as well as human, the drama of the cross became a place of atonement where God and the human were reconciled –with all the images that were utilized to describe that drama of salvation. It appears to me that the two paths referred to above by © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page10   Hall emerged very early in the era of establishment – political quietism and personal piety. Only with a posture of political quietism can the Empire tolerate the religious cult of whatever sort. And now, rather than the Jesus movement continuing in the path of its founder, it became a cult of salvation – Jesus as my personal savior. I can be assured of my personal salvation while I live in an imperial state that may be ruthless in its world domination and militarism. With some exceptions, I think that has been the pattern of the Christian Church; co-opted by empire, blessing the status quo, failing to speak truth to power. The Pope may make public statements and take positions on critical issues concerning the international situation but the respective national governments pay little heed. So also with the World Council of Churches or the National Council of Churches. In the meantime the Church continues to offer the gift of salvation in Jesus’ name and do much good in the world among the struggling masses of humankind. The more I become attuned to the Way of Jesus, the more I realize how little I have followed him. The more I realize how irrelevant the church is in a world that is so fraught with danger, the danger of seeing the human experience come to an end in nuclear holocaust, a world in which my own nation has become in our day what Rome was in the day of Jesus. Ironically, Roman Imperial power killed Jesus as a dangerous subversive, one who practiced non-violent resistance to the established order than dominated the world by military might – and then coopted his movement, transforming it into an agency of Empire, a harmless cult of personal salvation. With these growing realizations, you can understand why I feel the tension of being both a follower of Jesus and a citizen of this nation. Tomorrow we will observe Memorial Day and remember those who died on behalf of their country. Somehow it feels so different to me than the days of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation. To be drafted by one’s nation for service when one’s nation is under threat is honorable. To remember with gratitude the sacrifice of those whose lives were offered up to defend the freedom and security of the nation is right and proper. But it feels different to me when, because of my nation’s imperial designs, a volunteer military is established, not primarily to defend our nation but to be the means of world domination. I suspect few of us are aware of the massive military network spread around the globe with bases on every continent but Antarctica! A massive military-industrial complex warned about by President Eisenhower has become a reality. We, as a nation, are in the grip of imperial domination at a time in the world when the © Grand Valley State University �Can Eagle and Dove Fly Together? Richard A. Rhem Page11   global reality has arrived. Such a reality’s imperative is nuclear disarmament, the end of war and the building of world government. Now and then, here and there, voices have been raised for peace and human community. For example, during the First World War, one of the nation’s greatest preachers offered a prayer to which a response set forth clearly the choice we face: “O, God, bless Germany! At war with her people, we hate them not at all… We acknowledge before Thee our part in the world’s iniquity….we dare not stand in Thy sight and accuse Germany as though she alone were guilty of our international disgrace. We all are guilty.” The brief clip goes on, “Charles Biddle, an American pilot, responded to Fosdick’s prayer by pledging to kill as many ‘Huns’ as he could, saying that, ‘if Christianity requires us to forgive them I am afraid I am no Christian.” (Church HistoryMarch, cited in the Christian Century, May 5, 2009). The American pilot, Biddle, “got it” – The Way of Jesus or the way of war – on the way to human catastrophe. Which will we choose? For me there is only one choice: The Way of Peace as embodied in the Way of Jesus. References: Douglas John Hall. Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context, Vol. I. Fortress Press, 1991. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Memorial Day Weekend, Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Series A Reflection on the Way of Jesus and a Nation's Imperial Designs Scripture Text Matt. 5:38-48, Luke 4:6-21, Acts 1:1-11, 2:1-3 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Douglas John Hall. Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context, Vol.1. Fortress Press, 1991. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090524 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-05-24 Title A name given to the resource Can the Eagle and the Dove Fly Together? Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on May 24, 2009 entitled "Can the Eagle and the Dove Fly Together?", as part of the series "A Reflection on the Way of Jesus and a Nation's Imperial Designs", on the occasion of Memorial Day Weekend, Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Matt. 5:38-48, Luke 4:6-21, Acts 1:1-11, 2:1-3. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Way of Jesus https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/83a020fed34ad2daec4717ca8cc2fbe9.pdf 336c47ab32af1445c37db5ad5a199b18 PDF Text Text Easter Reflection Luke 24:13-35 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mothers’ Trust Ganges, Michigan April 19, 2009 Prepared Text of Sermon   Last week another Easter – the highest Holy Day of the Christian Calendar, the culmination of the Season of Lent and the darkness of Holy Week. The day dawns and the faithful shout, “The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed.” The worship of Easter is magnificent; the music lifts one into ecstasy and the message of resurrection assures that when darkness has done its darkest deed, God acts to assure that in the end the evil foe is defeated, the agents of evil are vanquished and the final word is light not darkness, joy, not sadness, triumph, not defeat.   Why  then  would  I  rather  preach  on  Palm  Sunday  than  Easter;  Maundy  Thursday   than  Easter;  Good  Friday  than  Easter?  This  is  in  fact  the  case.  I’ve  been  aware  of  it   for  several  years.  During  those  years  I  have  loved  our  Easter  worship  –  the  liturgy,   the  music,  the  whole  setting  so  fraught  with  spring  –new  life,  new  beginning   expressed  in  the  décor  of  the  day.  But  the  sermon;  that  has  been  the  rub.     In  a  sermon  entitled  “The  End  Is  Life,”  Frederick  Buechner  refers  to  the  Jewish   leaders  coming  to  Pilate  to  have  a  guard  set  at  the  Tomb  lest  the  disciples  come  and   steal  the  body.  Pilate  responds,  go  ahead  –  make  it  as  secure  as  you  can.  Then   Buechner  raises  the  question  “How  do  soldiers  secure  the  world  against  a  miracle?”   And  he  continues,  pointing  to  the  fact  that  one  can  do  a  great  deal  in  defense  against   miracles  –  and  he  points  an  accusing  finger  at  preachers  on  Easter:     …. How does an old man keep the sun from rising? How do soldiers secure the world against miracle?   Yet  maybe  it  is  not  as  hard  as  they  feared.  I  suspect  that  many  of  us  could   have  greatly  reassured  them.  I  suspect  that  many  of  us  could  tell  them  that  all   in  all  there  is  a  lot  one  can  do  in  defense  against  miracle,  and,  unless  I  badly   miss  my  guess,  there  are  thousands  upon  thousands  of  ministers  doing   precisely  that  at  any  given  instant  –  making  it  as  secure  as  they  can,  that  is,   which  is  really  quite  secure  indeed.    The  technique  of  the  chief  priests  and   the  Pharisees  was  to  seal  the  tomb  with  a  boulder  and  then  to  post  a  troop  of   guards  to  keep  watch  over  it;  but  even  for  its  time  that  was  crude.  The  point   © Grand Valley State University   �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 2   is  not  to  try  to  prevent  the  thing  from  happening  –  like  trying  to  stop  the   wind  with  a  machine  gun  –  but,  every  time  it  happens,  somehow  to  explain  it   away,  to  deflect  it,  defuse  it,  in  one  way  or  another  to  dispose  of  it.  And  there   are  at  least  as  many  ways  of  doing  this  as  there  are  sermons  preached  on   Easter  Sunday.          (Frederick  Buechner,  The  Magnificent  Defeat,  p.  77)     Those words have rattled me for a long time – that book of Buechner’s sermons was published in 1966. Buechner was an ordained Presbyterian minister but, I think, never served a congregation or preached much at all. He was a writer and a great writer he is, stimulating as in this Easter sermon and as a good preacher should be –troubling!   Buechner  illustrates  what  he  means  when  he  accuses  preachers  of  Easter  sermons   deflecting  or  defusing  the  miracle  of  resurrection:     We  can  say  that  the  story  of  the  Resurrection  means  simply  that  the   teachings  of  Jesus  are  immortal  like  the  plays  of  Shakespeare  or  the  music  of   Beethoven  and  that  their  wisdom  and  truth  will  live  on  forever.  Or  we  can   say  that  the  Resurrection  means  that  the  spirit  of  Jesus  is  undying,  that  he   himself  lives  on  among  us,  the  way  that  Socrates  does,  for  instance,  in  the   good  that  he  left  behind  him,  in  the  lives  of  all  who  follow  his  great  example.   Or  we  can  say  that  the  language  in  which  the  Gospels  describe  the   Resurrection  of  Jesus  is  the  language  of  poetry  and  that,  as  such,  it  is  not  to  be   taken  literally  but  as  pointing  to  a  truth  more  profound  than  the  literal.  Very   often,  I  think,  this  is  the  way  that  the  Bible  is  written,  and  I  would  point  to   some  of  the  stories  about  the  birth  of  Jesus,  for  instance,  as  examples;  but  in   the  case  of  the  Resurrection,  this  simply  does  not  apply  because  there  really   is  no  story  about  the  Resurrection  in  the  New  Testament.  Except  in  the  most   fragmentary  way,  it  is  simply  proclaimed  as  a  fact.  Christ  is  risen!  In  fact,  the   very  existence  of  the  New  Testament  itself  proclaims  it.  Unless  something   very  real  indeed  took  place  on  that  strange,  confused  morning,  there  would   be  no  New  Testament,  no  Church,  no  Christianity.  (p.  77f)     After seven years of pastoral ministry, four in Spring Lake and three in New Jersey, I left for Europe where I studied for four years at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. I had considered graduate study when I was in Seminary but after four years of college and three years of seminary study – at age 25 – I was ready to realize my goal of becoming a pastor.   I  was  very  conservative  –  an  orthodox  Reformed  pastor.  I  was  very  serious  and  very   insecure  I  now  realize.  I  dotted  the  i’s  and  crossed  the  t’s;  I  was  also  defensive   against  any  question  raised  to  my  orthodox  Reformed  theology.  I  didn’t  really   understand  that  then  but  I  have  come  to  realize  that  the  posture  of  certitude  I   displayed  was  a  cover  for  a  deep-­‐seated  fear  that  Christian  faith  as  I  understood  it   and  believed  it  might  not  be  able  to  withstand  the  assaults  of  modernity  and  the   ongoing  explosion  of  knowledge  in  all  areas  of  human  inquiry.  If  I  remember   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 3   correctly,  it  was  not  a  question  whether  or  not  my  faith  understanding  was  true;   with  all  my  being  I  believed  it  to  be  the  truth  based  on  Scriptural  revelation  and   Reformed  confessional  interpretation.  My  hidden  worry  was  that  that  truth  might   not  prevail  in  the  battle  of  opposing  theologies,  philosophies  and  modern  science.     In  reflection  on  those  early  years  of  ministry  I  now  realize  that  I  was  really  scared  to   death  because,  ironically,  I  was  a  good  enough  student  to  sense  the  very  real   challenges  that  were  raised  against  my  very  narrow  and  parochial  views.  In  other   words,  I  “got”  the  questions  even  though  I  could  hardly  have  let  that  fact  arise  in  my   consciousness.     Eventually  the  questions  “got”  me.  After  seven  years  of  preaching  and  pastoral   ministry,  I  finally  arrived  at  the  place  where  I  no  longer  had  answers  for  all  the   questions  but  began  to  discern  the  questions.  It  was  time  to  face  those  questions  by   fulfilling  the  postponed  adventure  of  further  study  and  that  in  Europe  where   Professor  Hendrikus  Berkhof,  theologian  of  the  Hervormde  Kerk  on  the  faculty  of   the  University  of  Leiden,  took  me  on  and  became  my  mentor.  For  four  years  I  read   voraciously,  took  in  lectures,  sermons  and  had  frequent  appointments  with   Professor  Berkhof,  who,  for  me,  was  the  perfect  teacher  and  guide.  A  perfect  teacher   for  me  because  he  himself  had  gone  through  the  very  struggle  to  unite  mind  and   heart  that  I  was  going  through.  I  would  raise  my  questions  and  he  would  say,  “Ja,  Ja,   that  is  the  question,”  whereas  what  I  wanted  was  the  answer.  Those  were  marvelous   years  of  intense  theological,  biblical  struggle  with  the  Christian  faith.     Barth  and  Bultmann  were  still  the  leading  lights  of  European  theological  scholarship   along  with  a  growing  host  of  colleagues.  Berkhof  assigned  me  Barth’s  Dogmatics,  Vol.   I,  2  –The  Doctrine  of  the  Word  of  God  –  this  was  the  second  half  of  Volume  I   consisting  of  a  mere  854  pages.  I  had  been  given  the  impression  at  Western   Theological  Seminary  during  my  sojourn  there  in  the  late  50’s  that  Barth  was   suspect;  we  did  not  read  Barth.  But  now,  as  I  did  so,  I  was  amazed.  Not  only  was  he   the  greatest  theologian  of  the  twentieth  century,  he  was  affirming  the  orthodox  faith   in  which  I  had  been  raised  and  educated  and  had  preached.     For  example,  regarding  the  resurrection  about  which  we  are  inquiring  today,  Barth   speaks  of  it  as  the  miracle  at  the  end  of  Jesus’  presence  in  history  as  the  Incarnate   God.  At  the  beginning,  the  miracle  of  the  virgin  birth  indicating  Jesus  was  not  the   product  of  human  capability.  He  was  in  history  but  did  not  arise  out  of  history.  And   at  the  end,  the  miracle  of  resurrection,  the  empty  tomb,  the  sign  that  death  was   overcome.  These  are  Barth’s  own  words:     Now it is no accident that for us the Virgin birth is paralleled by the miracle of which the Easter witness speaks, the miracle of the empty tomb. These two miracles belong together. They constitute, as it were, a single sign, the special function of which, compared with other signs and wonders of the New Testament witness, is to describe and mark out the existence of Jesus Christ, amid the many © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 4   other existences in human history, as that human historical existence in which God is Himself, God is alone, God is directly the Subject, the temporal reality of which is not only called forth, created, conditioned and supported by the eternal reality of God, but is identical with it. The Virgin birth at the opening and the empty tomb at the close of Jesus’ life bear witness that this life is a fact marked off from all the rest of human life, and marked off in the first instance, not by our understanding or our interpretation, but by itself. Marked off in regard to its origin: it is free of the arbitrariness which underlies all our existences. And marked off in regard to its goal: it is victorious over the death to which we are all liable. Only within these limits is it what it is and is it correctly understood, as the mystery of the revelation of God. It is to that mystery that these limits point – he who ignores them or wishes them away must see to it that he is not thinking of something quite different from this…. The  mutual  relationship  between  these  two  limits  may  perhaps  be  defined   thus.  The  Virgin  birth  denotes  particularly  the  mystery  of  revelation.  It   denotes  the  fact  that  God  stands  at  the  start  where  real  revelation  takes  place   –  God  and  not  the  arbitrary  cleverness,  capability,  or  piety  of  man.  In  Jesus   Christ  God  comes  forth  out  of  the  profound  hiddenness  of  His  divinity  in  order   to  act  as  God  among  us  and  upon  us.  That  is  revealed  and  made  visible  to  us  in   the  sign  of  the  resurrection  of  Jesus  Christ  from  the  dead,  but  it  is  grounded   upon  the  fact  signified  by  the  Virgin  birth,  that  here  in  this  Jesus  God  Himself   has  really  come  down  and  concealed  Himself  in  humanity.  It  is  because  He   was  veiled  here  that  He  could  and  had  to  unveil  Himself  as  He  did  at  Easter.   The  empty  tomb,  on  the  other  hand,  denotes  particularly  the  revelation  of  the   mystery….That  God  Himself  in  His  complete  majesty  was  one    with  us,  as  the   Virgin  birth  indicates,  is  verified  in  what  the  empty  tomb  indicates,  that  here   in  this  Jesus  the  living  God  has  spoken  to  us  men  in  accents  we  cannot  fail  to   hear.  Because  He  has  unveiled  Himself  here  as  the  One  He  is,  we  may  and   must  say  what  the  Christmas  messages  says,  that  unto  you  is  born  this  day  the   Saviour.  The  mystery  at  the  beginning  is  the  basis  of  the  mystery  at  the  end;   and  by  the  mystery  of  the  end  the  mystery  of  the  beginning  becomes  active   and  knowable.  And  since  this  is  so,  the  same  objective  content  is  signified  in   the  one  case  by  the  miracle  of  the  Virgin  birth,  in  the  other  by  the  miracle  of   the  empty  tomb….      (Dogmatics:  The  Doctrine  of  the  Word  of  God,  Vol  1).     This  is  what  I  had  always  believed.  The  master  theologian  of  the  century  affirming   the  objective,  literal  reality  of  the  Virgin  birth  and  the  bodily  resurrection  that  left   the  tomb  empty.     One  might  suspect  that  my  faith  journey  would  have  been  satisfied  with  this  brilliant   scholar  affirming  my  own  faith  understanding  from  childhood  through  long  years  of   education  and  orthodox  preaching.  Strangely  that  did  not  turn  out  to  be  the  case.  At   that  point  in  my  experience  it  was  no  longer  enough  to  say,  “The  Bible  says….”  I  was   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 5   quite  surprised  myself  but  I  began  to  question  Barth’s  bold  claim  of  biblical  teaching   as  the  Word  of  God  not  to  be  questioned.     As  I  continued  my  study  I  was  guided  by  Berkhof  to  a  movement  of  young  scholars   who  had  been  the  students  of  Karl  Barth  and  Rudolf  Bultmann.  As  happens   repeatedly,  in  the  course  of  historical  development,  whether  in  religion  or  politics  or   the  broader  cultural  milieu,  there  is    action  and  reaction.  Questions  addressed  by   one  generation  leave  unanswered  questions  struggled  with  by  a  previous   generation.  I  came  to  realize  how  the  “climate  of  opinion”  of  a  period  has  much  to  do   with  the  issues  addressed  and  the  manner  of  that  address.  I  was  beginning  to  see   that  the  strong  reaction  of  Karl  Barth  to  nineteenth  century  liberalism  was  precisely   that  –  a  strong  reaction.       In  order  to  put  Barth’s  Neo-­‐Orthodox  movement  in  context,  we  need  to  understand   that  against  which  he  reacted.  In  the  compass  of  this  paper  it  is  not  possible  to  do   justice  to  the  whole  development  of  the  Age  of  Reason  or  the  Enlightenment.  It  is  a   period  beginning  in  the  seventeenth  century  but  usually  identified  with  the   eighteenth  century.  It  was  a  period  in  which  human  reason  was  understood  as  the   primary  source  for  ascertaining  truth  and  the  only  legitimate  court  of  appeal  for   authority.  The  dogmatic  structure  of  the  Christian  faith  based  on  divine  revelation   contained  in  the  Bible  was  called  in  question.  The  foundations  were  shaking.  The  old   supernaturalism  was  under  serious  threat.       Into  such  a  context  Frederich  Schleiermacher  (1768  –  1834)  was  born  and  into   which  he  emerged  as  a  leading  theological  voice  and  is  recognized  as  the  father  of   liberalism.  It  was  his  recognition  of  the  serious  intellectual  challenge  faced  by   Christian  theology  that  Schleiermacher  felt  compelled  to  find  another  foundation  for   religion.  The  intellectual  climate  of  opinion  was  allied  against  supernaturally   inspired  doctrines  and  was  moving  orthodox  Christian  theology  towards  the   periphery  of  intellectual  and  social  life.  Schleiermacher  sought  a  new  foundation  for   religion  in  human  experience,  in  an  innate  awareness  of  God.  He  found  the  ground  of   religion  in  human  feeling,  in  the  feeling  of  absolute  dependence.     For  Schleiermacher,  then,  and  ‘knowledge’  in  religion,  in  an  intellectual   sense,  could  only  be  a  reflection  upon  the  conscious  feelings  of  relationship   to  the  divine,  not  a  description  or  analysis  directly  of  the  divine  per  se  (but,  as   we  saw  in  Section  1,  pp.  36ff.,  neither  were  the  feelings  those  of  the  self  per   se,  in  isolation  from  what  is  other).  Schleiermacher  was  among  the  first  to   realize  that  theology  defeats  its  own  purpose  if  it  speaks  of  God  as  if  he  were   simply  another  ‘object’,  distinguished  from  other  ‘objects’  only  by  being   ‘greater’  and  ‘removed  from’  the  finite  world.  Such  a  ‘God’  is  less  than  the   truly  Infinite  One  present  in  and  to  the  whole  universe.  Such  a  view  of  God,   says  Schleiermacher,  ‘as  one  single  being  outside  of  the  world  and  behind  the   world  is  not  the  beginning  and  the  end  of  religion’.  True  religion  is  not  this  –   or  any  other  –  idea  but  ‘immediate  consciousness  of  the  Deity  as  he  is  found   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 6   in  ourselves  and  in  the  world.’  It  is  the  immediate  consciousness  which  is  the   material  upon  which  theology  works  directly.  This  is  the  basic  tenet  of   Schleiermacher  which  has  drawn  the  later  neo-­‐orthodox  fire,  charging  that   he  has  substituted  human  feelings,  human  religiosity,  human  psychology  and   subjectivity  for  the  proper  subject-­‐matter  of  theology,  namely  God’s  divinity   and  purpose  as  self-­‐revealed  in  his  Word.  Again,  the  charge  must  be  set   against  the  evidence  that  Schleiermacher  was  interested  in  the  ‘emotions’   precisely  because  they  did    point  beyond  themselves  to  the  reality  which  had   stimulated  them.   (Keith  W.  Clements,  Freidrich  Schleiermacher,  Pioneer  of  Modern  Theology,  p.   44f)     There you have it – the “climate of opinion” that moved Schleiermacher to seek a new foundation for human religion because he saw the old foundation washing away – a foundation of revelational truth in the Bible and the dogmatic structure of Christian theology – and in quite another “climate of opinion” – a Europe in shambles post-World War I sensing the bankruptcy of nineteenth century liberalism ripe for “a Word from the Lord”!   As indicated above, Professor Berkhof pointed me to a circle of scholars, some the former students of Karl Barth, who were no longer satisfied, as I found I was not, with the denial of the Enlightenment challenge to the dogmatic claim of supernatural revelation in the Bible along with the refusal to investigate the historical roots of scripture. The critical study of scripture arose in the eighteenth century and became a significant discipline in the nineteenth century but Barth turned his back on it. But his students re-visited those questions. To claim God visited our historical scene but to refuse to seek verification for that “sojourn in the human” did not satisfy this movement of younger scholars.   The  reason  I  am  going  into  all  of  this  is  that  the  focus  of  this  investigation  of   historical  verification  was  Jesus’  resurrection.     Given  his  historical  context  –  his  moment  in  the  unfolding  of  the  human  story,  Karl   Barth  had  a  word  that  resonated  deeply  with  his  contemporaries.  But   Schleiermacher  had  not  imagined  a  crisis  of  Christian  faith  in  the  nineteenth   century.  Another  great  Christian  scholar  had  addressed  the  Christian  tradition  in   light  of  the  rise  of  historical  thinking  in  the  nineteenth  century.  Ernst  Troeltsch  did   major  work  in  addressing  the  question  of  the  historical  claims  of  Christian  faith  –   that  whole  discussion  I  cannot  go  into  here  except  to  underscore  my  point  that  real   questions  do  not  go  away  if  they  are  legitimate  questions.  After  the  Barthian   clearing  of  the  decks  of  such  questions  they  reappeared  because  they  were  real   questions.     The  young  scholar  that  spoke  to  me  was  Wolfhart  Pannenberg.  I  will  not  attempt  to   set  forth  his  theology  of  history  here.  It  is  complex  and  impressive.  In  sum,  he   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 7   sought  to  give  historical  verification,  to  the  extent  that  is  possible,  for  the   resurrection  of  Jesus.  He  was  close  to  Barth  in  his  conclusion  but  only  after  placing   the  resurrection  in  a  full  historical  tradition.  It  was  on  such  theological  puzzles  that  I   was  beginning  to  write  when  I  left  Europe  and  took  up  my  ministry  once  again  in   Spring  Lake.     And  it  was  out  of  all  that  theological  wrestling  that  I  began  to  preach  and,  indeed,   preached  for  years.  But  I  had  not  arrived.  I  was  definitely  a  work  in  progress.  I  do   remember  early  on  in  my  preaching  and  teaching  saying,  “Give  me  Jesus  and  the   resurrection  and  all  else  is  negotiable.”  That  gave  me  a  message  for  those  years  of   my  return  to  preaching.     I  was  ready  for  the  third  quest  of  the  historical  Jesus.  I  haven’t  referred  to  the  Quest   of  the  Historical  Jesus  in  the  nineteenth  century  but  there  was  a  serious  address  of   this  matter  with  lives  of  Jesus  published,  each  trying  to  recover  the  historical  figure   in  his  context.  Without  filling  in  that  chapter  I  will  only  refer  to  what  is  sometimes   called  the  Third  Quest.  The  second  was  occurring  while  I  was  in  Europe  in  the  late   60’s  but  did  not  become  the  catalyst  for  a  major  movement.  But  in  1991  John   Dominic  Crossan  produced  a  serious  and  ambitious  study  entitled  The  Historical   Jesus  –  The  Life  of  a  Mediterranean  Jewish  Peasant.  That  subtitle  speaks  volumes  and   Crossan  delivers  on  the  subject.     In  1987  another  Jesus  scholar,  Marcus  Borg,  published  Jesus  –  A  New  Vision.  Again   the  subtitle  gives  the  clue  to  the  contents:  Spirit,  Culture  and  the  Life  of  Discipleship.   In  1994  he  published  Meeting  Jesus  Again  for  the  First  Time  which  became  widely   popular.  Crossan  could  not  believe  his  dense  scholarly  treatment  should  have   become  a  bestseller  which  was  also  the  case  with  Borg  whose  works  are  scholarly   but  carry  a  pastoral/spiritual  tone  along  with  the  research.  Both  scholars  were  part   of  a  group  called  the  Jesus  Seminar.  I  will  not  delineate  the  work  of  Crossan,  Borg   and  others  here  but  only  indicate  that  here  was  a  fresh  approach  in  our  time  to   locate  Jesus  in  his  social,  cultural,  political  context.  I  received  these  studies  with   great  profit.  On  the  basis  of  my  earlier  contention  that  there  is  in  any  historical   period  a  “climate  of  opinion”  I  would  add  that  that  is  also  the  case  in  our  individual   lives;  there  are  times  and  periods  when  our  heart  and  mind  are  open  to  movement,   when  we  sense  a  hunger,  a  yearning  for  something  more  as  we  encounter  the   vicissitudes  of  our  life  journey.  At  any  rate  this  was  true  in  my  case.     My  European  study  had  continued  to  ground  my  preaching.  In  the  years  following   my  return  to  the  Church  in  1971  I  kept  reading  and  reflecting  and  when  one  is   engaged  in  weekly  preaching  and  teaching,  constant  reading,  reflection  and  writing   are  demanded  of  one.  I  cannot  now  trace  precisely  how  my  focus  on  and   understanding  of  Jesus  developed  but  I  know  I  was  becoming  more  fascinated  by  the   life  of  Jesus  than  in  the  early  creedal  dogmatic  delineation  of  the  risen  Christ  of  faith.   In  my  file  I  have  a  sermon  of  April  15,  1984  entitled  “Jesus  You  are  Really   Something”.  The  gist  of  that  sermon  is  acknowledgment  that  to  that  point  in  my  life,   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 8   my  spiritual  hero  was  Dietrich  Bonhoeffer  whose  following  of  the  way  of  Jesus  led   him  to  oppose  Hitler  and  National  Socialism,  for  which  he  paid  with  his  life  just   before  the  end  of  World  War  II  on  April  8,  1945,  at  the  prison  camp  at  Flossenburg.   April  15,  1984,  was  Palm  Sunday  and  my  text  was  from  Luke  19:41  –  “when  he   beheld  the  city,  he  wept  over  it.”     Looking  back  over  the  years  I  realize  something  was  at  work  in  me.  Jesus,  the  human   being,  was  coming  alive  for  me  in  the  context  of  his  historical  period.  Here  was  one   who  had  spoken  truth  to  power  and  for  that  reason  was  crucified.  As  Dominic   Crossan  declares,  at  the  communion  table  where  there  is  bread  symbolizing  body   and  cup  symbolizing  blood,  body  and  blood  are  separated  pointing  to  violent  death.   Jesus  did  not  die  of  old  age,  peacefully  in  his  bed.     Something  was  germinating  in  me  in  the  80’s  which  was  ready  to  spring  into  flower   in  the  90’s.  Scholars,  especially  Crossan  and  Borg,  put  Jesus  in  context  for  me  such   that  I  saw  the  heroism  of  Bonhoeffer  as  replicating  the  way  of  Jesus,  which  of  course   meant  that,  for  me,  Jesus  now  becomes  the  great  exemplar  of  human  life  before  the   face  of  God,  full  of  love  and  grace  and  compassion  with  the  courage  to  live  out  his   vision  faithfully.     Palm  Sundays  seem  to  be  critical  points  in  my  own  development.  It  was  April  4,   1993,  Palm  Sunday,  that  my  sermon  was  entitled  “Jesus  Died  Because  of  Our  Sins,   Not  For  Them”.  Not  surprisingly,  the  text  was  Luke’s  Palm  Sunday  account  –  once   again,  Jesus  weeping  over  Jerusalem.  This  was  a  radical  claim.  I  was  transforming   the  cross  of  Jesus  from  a  place  of  atonement  where  Jesus’  death  was  a  bearing  of  the   sin  of  the  world  to  procure  salvation  for  the  world  to  a  place  of  crucifixion  where  the   political  and  religious  establishment  powers  were  killing  one  who  became  a  threat   to  law  and  order,  one  who  in  the  best  prophetic  tradition  of  Israel  spoke  his  truth,   his  vision  of  the  Kingdom  of  God.     This  Jesus  moved  me  deeply.  It  was  this  Jesus  I  wanted  to  emulate.  It  was  this  Jesus  I   could  love  with  my  whole  being.  This  weeping  one,  this  bleeding  one.  This  one  who,   in  his  anguish  prayed,  “Father  forgive  them,  for  they  know  not  what  they  are  doing.”     This  Jesus  who  experienced  the  darkness  of  crushed  dreams,  feeling  abandoned,   crying,  “My  God,  why…?”     This  Jesus  who  finally  committed  his  cause,  himself,  to  God,  “Father,  into  Thy  hands  I   commit  my  spirit,”  entrusting  himself,  his  cause,  his  whole  being  to  God  whom  he   called  Father.     As  for  Frederich  Beuchner  with  whom  I  began,  whose  accusation  that  so  many   preachers  defuse  the  miracle  of  Easter  in  their  Easter  sermons,  I  can  only  say  I  don’t   really  know  about  an  empty  tomb  and  I  don’t  really  care  to  spend  time  and  energy   trying  to  prove  the  historicity  of  the  resurrection.  There  are  differing  accounts  of   © Grand Valley State University �Easter Reflection Richard A. Rhem Page 9   Easter  in  the  four  Gospels  and  Paul,  and  one  cannot  really  harmonize  them.  Volumes   have  been  written  on  this  biblical  puzzle  and  it  really  doesn’t  interest  me.  For  me  it   is  enough  to  believe  he  arose  into  the  Mystery  we  name  God  and  he  lives  because  he   continues  to  appear  to  those  whose  lives  are  transformed  in  that  encounter.     Perhaps  my  favorite  Easter  story  is  the  Emmaus  Road  encounter.  Jesus  overtakes   two  disciples  on  their  way  home  from  Jerusalem,  dejected  and  full  of  despair.  He   joins  them  on  the  way  but  they  do  not  recognize  him.  He  speaks  to  them  of  their   scriptures  and  when  they  reach  the  village  they  invite  him  to  join  them  in  their   home.  The  table  is  set  and  then  the  guest  becomes  the  host.  He  took  bread,  blessed   and  broke  it,  and  gave  it  to  them.  “Then  their  eyes  were  opened,  and  they  recognized   him;  and  he  vanished  from  their  sight.”  They  returned  to  Jerusalem,  found  the   disciples  and  others  gathered  declaring,  “The  Lord  has  risen  indeed…”  and  the  two   Emmaus  pilgrims  told  their  story,  telling  the  group  “how  he  had  been  made  known   to  them  in  the  breaking  of  the  bread.”     This  is  how  Crossan  describes  that  encounter  recorded  by  Luke:   The metaphoric condensation of the first years of early Christian thought and practice into one parabolic afternoon. Emmaeus never happened. Emmaeus always happens. (A Revolutionary Biography, p. 197) That,  Rev.  Beuchner,  is  the  best  I  can  do.  And  for  me  it  is  enough  for  He  lives  and   continues  to  be  the  agent  of  human  personal  and  social  transformation.  The  Lord  is   risen  indeed! References Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol.I.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Eastertide Scripture Text Luke 24:13-35 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20090419 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2009-04-19 Title A name given to the resource Easter Reflection Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on April 19, 2009 entitled "Easter Reflection", on the occasion of Eastertide, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Luke 24:13-35. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/f5a2789312eaf740221a4f3d93923a83.pdf e883ac103e64e214b5119f5bde45b08e PDF Text Text The God We Cannot Flee Heartfelt Poems Psalm 139 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan October 19, 2008 Prepared text of the sermon This is the fourth of the four scheduled presentations for 2008. As I begin each time, I want to express my appreciation to Tapas and the Interfaith Center for the invitation and the opportunity to reflect on biblical themes from my own Christian tradition. Here all are honored, celebrated, and respected and one experiences that all too rare spirit of warm welcome, affirmation and openness. There is something about the atmosphere here that invites one to relax, to share openly and candidly and sense one is valued. This is a place of rich spiritual life where religious practice and spiritual quest are joined in a wonderfully positive community that is unapologetically a community of religious faith in its wide variety of manifestations. I had to smile to myself a week ago yesterday as I read the Grand Rapids Press section on Religion. I was reminded of my pre-retirement preaching ministry, when on Saturday morning, I regularly took the Press Religion section up to my loft where I would hibernate until I left for Christ Community Church on Sunday morning. More often than not, there would be something in the paper that would get my adrenaline flowing and even, if I were fortunate, provide an entrée to the subject of the sermon I had announced. I smiled because it happened again; what I was ruminating on for today was dealt with, in a sense, in two pieces that referred to the same current phenomenon – the film by humorist Bill Maher entitled Religulous. You have probably heard about the recent release of the film; it has a strong PR campaign working to promote the film. The L.A. Times printed a piece entitled “Bill Maher’s Religulous; Oscar Bait?” (August 21, 2008): When I attended a press screening for Bill Maher’s “Religulous” in New York on Tuesday, it struck me like a lightning bolt on the road to the Kodak Theatre via Damascus: yeah, “Religulous” will probably be nominated for best docu at the Oscars – and God help us all after that. © Grand Valley State University   �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 2   We know that “Religulous” is seriously in the derby for several reasons. First, Lionsgate hired veteran Oscars PR reps to handle its ballyhoo (Michele Robertson in L.A., Jeff Hill in New York). Secondly, the studio is giving the documentary its theatrical runs in L.A. and New York to qualify it for academy consideration, as Jeff Sneider notes at Anne Thompson’s blog at Variety.com. Thirdly the hallelujahs that film critics gave it today at the screening. More disciples are sure to follow. In order to catch on widely like religion itself, what atheism has needed for a long time is a popular preacher to rally ‘round. Maher just volunteered for the job that’s been vacant since Madalyn Murray O’Hair vanished in the 1990’s (eventually found murdered in 2001).Richard Dawkins has been a fine temporary stand-in, but not flashy like O’Hair. Bill Maher kicks things up a notch. He’s a pop culture hipster who already has a large, antiestablishment flock, and he has a bully pulpit that O’Hair didn’t: his own HBO show plus vast presence across all media. The Huffington Post notes: In a statement about the film, Maher explained his rationale for making it: It has been my pleasure over the last decade and a half to make organized religion one of my favorite targets. I often explained to people, “I don’t need to make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.” And, then I go ahead and make fun of it too, just for laughs. With religious fanatics like George Bush and Osama bin Laden now taking over the world, it seemed to me in recent years that this issue – this cause of debunking the man behind the curtain – needed to have a larger, more insistent and focused forum than late night television. I wanted to make a documentary, and I wanted it to be funny. In fact, since there is nothing more ridiculous than the ancient mythological stories that live on as today’s religions, this movie would try to be a real knee slapper. Unless, of course, you’re religious, then you might not like it. As part of the film, Maher has also created a website, Disbeliefnet, as a parody of Beliefnet, the popular spiritual website. In response to the local showing of the film that occurred on Friday, October 3, Charles Honey used his column to suggest “It’s time to move beyond belief wars.” He writes we should divide into teams – religious believers on one side, atheists and agnostics on the other with each side getting ten minutes to present its case for or against God and religion. Then each side would get a five-minute rebuttal. Well, Honey is spoofing, of course, but his serious point is believers would do well to listen to the critics of religion and so would the sceptics. And, he concludes, both sides would do well to know when to give it a rest. © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 3   A more important piece in the Religion Section, also by Charles Honey, was entitled “Nonbelievers Make A Move”, in which he reports on a gathering of religious sceptics who gathered after seeing the movie. He writes, “For many of them, Maher’s mockery of religious faith was a kind of coming out for their beseiged minority of atheists and agnostics.” One complained, “They don’t respect us in our nonbelief….Why can’t we have a conversation about this?” To which a Hope College Professor of Psychology responds, “Great; let’s talk.” David Meyers is a fine scholar, widely published, and a serious Christian. His latest book is entitled A Friendly Letter to Sceptics and Atheists. He thinks scepticism is essential to healthy faith. He writes, Let’s, with a spirit of humility, put testable ideas to the test and then let’s throw out religion’s dirty bathwater. But then he adds, Is there amid the bathwater a respect-worthy baby – a reasonable and beneficial faith? Well, it is not my intention to get into this discussion. My comments flow from my expression of appreciation for this inter-faith community which strikes me as serene in its diverse religious observance. Perhaps it is simply that I am of an age that religious wars and conflict hold no interest for me. I’ve had enough of trying to persuade or convert or argue. But that doesn’t imply that I no longer find the spiritual/religious quest fascinating; I do. And I cherish a good book, a good conversation, arriving at a new insight. I never tire of wondering, wondering about the amazing cosmic story, the emergence of life, of consciousness and awareness, the evolution of human thought and the history of religion in all its varied facets. It is a great gift to be free of religious institutional concerns, budgets and building programs and memberships. I’ve paid my dues in that dimension of religious practice. And now, if anyone is interested, I can reflect on the mystery that is at the heart of reality, the Sacred and the Holy to which there has been universal witness of experience. And I can, if I desire, even view Religulous and read the hostile denials of God in Dawkin’s The God Delusion or the petulance of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. But that is not where I will feed my spirit. It is rather in the great classics of religious experience as well as the sacred texts themselves, for me, the biblical text. That is what these four reflections have been – hearing again the heartfelt poems that came to expression in the Hebrew Scripture. Last month my theme was “The Human Hunger for God” taking the words of the Psalmist in Psalm 42: © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 4   As the deer longs for flowing streams, So my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, For the Living God. Much of my presentation focused on a work by Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away. In sum, the authors claim on the basis of brain research that we are hard-wired for spiritual experience; it is a given of human nature. Supplementing that claim, I referred to a recent book by Huston Smith and Henry Rosemont, Jr., whose title raises the question, Is There a Universal Grammar of Religion? The authors agree there is. Huston Smith, the dean of scholars who has studied world religions, comes from a life-long Christian perspective. Rosemont, however, declares, “I am not a Christian, do not believe in God or gods….” Yet these two from oppositive positions on the God question and religious practice both affirm that there is written in the human DNA a religious dimension. (My presentation was, some have told me, heavy and I must admit, when I was finished it did feel a bit like a term paper.) We will look more closely at Psalm 139 in a moment but first I want to return to the discussion between Huston Smith and Henry Rosemont, Jr. in the recent work to which I referred last time – Is There a Universal Grammar of Religion? In his response to Huston Smith’s lecture claiming there is an innate human capacity for religious experience – a conclusion with which Rosemont agrees with Smith as well as the authors of Why God Won’t Go Away – he set himself apart from Huston in that Huston has remained in his childhood faith – Christian faith in the Methodist tradition – while Rosemont says, “I am not a Christian and I don’t believe in God…” You may find it strange that one who writes with Huston Smith and agrees that there is a universal human religious dimension would say he doesn’t believe in God. Obviously, for him religious experience must be of another sort than that of traditional religion focused on some conception of Divinity, of a Supreme Being though variously described. And indeed that is the case. I did not reference this last month but on my first reading of Rosemont’s response to Huston Smith’s lecture I was struck by his own statement of how he understood religious experience. As he was the designated responder to Huston Smith’s recent lecture, so a few years earlier Huston was the responder to a Rosemont lecture. Rosemont refers to that lecture as he tries to portray where he is in relation to Huston’s Christian understanding. He explains: Much of my lecture was devoted to claiming that the sacred texts of the world’s religions all provided spiritual disciplines for the achievement of religious experiences which I described as a strong feeling of belonging, or © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 5   of attunement, or, in Wittgenstein’s Christian-flavored account, “the experience of being absolutely safe.” Let me underline Rosemont’s description of religious experience – A strong feeling of belonging, or of attunement, or, in Wittgenstein’s Christian-flavored account, “the experience of being absolutely safe.” I found, and I find that a powerfully descriptive phrase that immediately resonated with me. Wittgenstein was one of the towering figures of early 20th century philosophical discussion, especially in the meaning of language in our discourse. I was frankly surprised to find such a description of religious experience in Wittgenstein. Rosemont went on to say that in his response to the lecture, Huston Smith pointed to that religious sense – I really liked what you moved up to in the notion of the mystical absolute safety, and the notion of belonging. But again, are these simply psychological states that these traditions give us as directives for how we can come to these feelings? Or, do they dig deeper into the nature of things to describe a reality, the ultimate reality which gives grounds for us to think that we are not just making it up when we have these sentiments of safety and belonging? (p. 40) Rosemont responded to Huston’s comment at the time of that discussion – My claim would be that just as we are “hard-wired” to respond in certain ways to human speech – the Universal Grammar – so are we wired equally to feel a sense of belonging in the natural world we experience with our sensory organs. But beyond that I make no ontological commitments… Now in this recent book he explains himself further. …although I restrict myself to the human realm, I take that realm, and religious experience, very seriously, and do not believe we are somehow “just making it up.” But as his remarks both then and now suggest, Smith does seem to want to say more, as he does at the outset of his lecture: The world (that my fourteen points) describe is objective, in the sense that it was here before we were and it is our business to understand it. He reiterates this claim in his ninth point: Nature does the same thing by building this Universal Grammar of language into our heads. We did not create that. It came from outside. © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 6   Now if by “outside” Smith means that our linguistic capacity is not such that we can modify it at will – that it does not depend on our whim, or even on any particular psychological state – then I would heartily agree, and believe Chomsky would as well. Language is simply an important feature of the species homo sapiens, and I would say the same for the religious capacity. But if by “outside” Smith wants to go beyond human biology, I fear I may not be able to join him. Do you catch what is going on here? Is religion an inner-psychological experience or does the experience point beyond itself to a Ground “outside” our personal experience? To feel “absolutely safe” – is that an inner psychological/spiritual experience or does that point beyond the personal experience to a transcendent, objective Ground? As I was gathering resources on our Psalm this morning, Psalm 139, which we will come to in a moment, I came on a sermon by Paul Tillich on the Psalm and was delighted because I thought maybe he could help me with the Smith/Rosemont question. Tillich, one of the seminal religious thinkers of the twentieth century, was well known for the description of God as the Ground of Being. I began to wonder if Tillich was trying to articulate an understanding somewhere between Rosemont and Smith. Ground of Being Is that Ground, the Creative Source, the Presence of Mystery within the one reality of our universe? Or is that a Foundation “outside” to use Huston’s words? This is what Tillich expresses in his sermon on Psalm 139: Christian theology and religious instruction speak of the Divine Omnipresence, which is the doctrine that God is everywhere, and of the Divine Omniscience, which is the doctrine that God knows everything. It is difficult to avoid such concepts in religious thought and education. But they are at least as dangerous as they are useful. They make us picture God as a thing with superhuman qualities, omnipresent like an electric power field, and omniscient like a superhuman brain. Such concepts as “Divine Omnipresence” and “Divine Omniscience” transform an overwhelming religious experience into an abstract, philosophical statement, which can be accepted and rejected, defined, redefined, and replaced. In making God an object besides other objects, the existence and nature of which are matters of argument, theology supports the escape to atheism…. Let us therefore forget these concepts, as concepts, and try to find their genuine meaning within our own experience. We all know that we cannot © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 7   separate ourselves at any time from the world to which we belong. There is no ultimate privacy or final isolation. We are always held and comprehended by something that is greater than we are, that has a claim upon us, and that demands response from us. The most intimate motions within the depths of our souls are not completely our own. For they belong also to our friends, to mankind, to the universe, and to the Ground of all being, the aim of our life. (The Shaking of the Foundations, p. 45f) Tillich discourages philosophical debate about the nature or attributes of God and encourages us to try to find what those concepts mean in our own experience. And he assumes that experience is real, not delusion – agreeing with the authors of Why God Won’t Go Away and with Huston Smith. He claims “We are always held and comprehended by something that is greater than we are, that has a claim upon us…”. I assume he is saying such a realization of being “held and comprehended by something” is a dimension of human experience reflective of the reality of the human situation. But what does his counsel to leave off philosophical debate and look to experience have to say to the question we raised about the positions of Huston Smith and Henry Rosemont? Could not the experience of being “held and comprehended” be either an experience pointing beyond itself to a “Ground Outside” as Huston would claim, or to an experience within the one reality of our existence, as Rosemont contends?? I’m not enough of a Tillich scholar to give an answer; perhaps in his total work an answer is available. But as I reflect on this whole question I cannot help but ask: Does it matter? Need it be either/or? In either case would not the experience be the same? And that experience would be, in Wittgenstein’s words, “the experience of being absolutely safe.” I wonder. Having been born into and nurtured in a community of faith that understood God as over against Creation, both transcending creation and immanent within it, I understand Huston Smith’s probing and his intention of grounding the human and human religious experience “outside” the realm of human experience, the Reality to which human religious symbols and stories point. I am inclined by everything that has shaped me to understand God as “outside”. I suspect that is the case also with Tillich although I wonder whether he was not suggesting God as the Ground of Being as immanent in the totality of reality, © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 8   moving away from the traditional theism that understood God as “outside” of our cosmic reality even though immanent within as well. A naïve criticism of religious experience as an inner psychological phenomenon would claim that that makes God and/or religious experience simply a figment of our imagination or, even more crassly, the result of self-delusion. We brainwash ourselves as it were. But what if our psychological experience is the fruit of the experience of the whole of reality – the means by which the Sacred Mystery, the Source and Ground of All That Is is perceived? What if the marvelous gift of imagination is precisely the locus of the intersection of divine spirit and human spirit? What if there is not a bifurcation of reality into eternal/temporal, spirit/matter, sacred/profane? Let’s take such a wondering question to the Psalms, to Israel’s hymnbook or Psalter. Of course we are dealing with an ancient cosmology, a three-storied universe, a God who is Person as we are persons – only more so – the Creator, Ruler, Judge and Savior. But, acknowledging that and recognizing such conceptuality cannot work for us, nonetheless listen for the experience to which the Psalmist gives expression – read it in your favorite translation – the experience of being known, completely known: O Lord, you have searched me And known me, … Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your Presence? For it was you who formed My inward parts; You knit me together In my mother’s womb Where could I flee? But why should I flee for I am immersed in the Presence, the Presence of Grace. The closing verses grow harsh, wishing death on the wicked or is it simply those who do not share the Psalmist’s divine vision? Whichever, thankfully, the Psalmist moves beyond his vituperative condemnation – sensing, it seems, that he is out of line. Such imprecatory expression has no place in the presence of the Presence, and he returns to his own self-awareness in the Presence of the God before whom he is an open book: Search me, know my heart, test me and know my thoughts …and lead me in the way everlasting. © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page 9   A moving conclusion, resonant with openness, humility and peace in the Presence. Some years ago I received a modern translation of Psalm 139 from Howard Moody of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, New York City. I think the author was a creative artist/poet on the church staff, the Rev. Al Carmines. I find this a most moving paraphrase of the Psalm: Yahweh, you have searched me, Known me deeply; Known my rest and restlessness, My innermost desires And where they lead In word and deed. Yahweh, you surround me, Hound me with a closeness Which will not retire – I cannot pass your test. Where shall I hide from your wind, Or where find a place that is faceless? No long road will lead away Nor deep sea drown your sounding voice. No height escapes your frightful reach Nor emptiness, your speech. The darkness leaves no time alone, For dark and light are both your home. There in the darkness of your secret place You formed my frame and shaped my face; There in the darkness of my mother’s womb You made room for me. Accept my praise: For I am dazed By your creation: Thoughtful of each instant of my time As if I were your only child; Yet my life, part of the ongoing rhyme Of history, your play. Why don’t you kill these selfish actors? Men who seek the center stage And try to play your part! How my heart rages at the sight of them! Why don’t you… © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page10   Search me and know my heart; Test me and know my doubts; And see if I am hiding in false face; And lead my words and actions by your grace. I am no accomplished judge of poetic expression but I find that powerful and moving, capturing in beautiful language the intimacy the Psalmist experienced in his witness to the God he could not flee. To use the phrase from Tillich, one could say the Psalmist found himself “always held and comprehended by something that is greater than we are, that has a claim upon us….” Or, to use Huston Smith’s language when describing that which is “outside” our experience: “…the ultimate reality which gives grounds for us to think that we are not just making it up when we have these sentiments of safety and belonging.” That feeling of safety and belonging would be a fitting description of Psalm 139. The experience of being absolutely safe. Experience – that is what the religious dimension of being human is all about. Religious experience has many facets and fruits as well as some shadow sides in human experience. The psalmist’s imprecations against the enemies of God as he understood God; the marriage of ignorance and arrogance that marks so much religious exclusivism and militancy. The control by institutional authoritarianism manipulating the people by the imputation of guilt and the prospect of an eternal burning. I could go on but to what avail? That is not what religious practice and observance is about in a place like this. It is not what it is about where it is a means to open the mind and warm the heart. And I know of no finer, more concise description of the fruit of the spiritual quest and the religious life than coming to an experience of being absolutely safe. Is that experience an inner psychological/spiritual experience or is it an experience grounded outside ourselves in the very structure of reality, in the Ground of Being, in the God beyond all the names and attributes by which the respective religions have described their vision of the Sacred Mystery of Being? Does it matter? Does it matter if the result of one’s religious observance and practice yields the experience of being absolutely safe? I know there would be a clamor should I suggest such an idea beyond the confines of this safe place. I can hear the objections already: © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page11   Is there not such a thing as Truth? Are you suggesting a relativity that makes no distinctions? Etc. Etc. I know. I know. But consider: what greater fruit can religion offer and provide than the feeling of being absolutely safe? Could one not live a fully human existence if grounded in such an experience: And could one not face one’s end with serenity if such was one’s experience? With all this on my mind, I attended a funeral yesterday at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church. A lovely woman who was a team member for many years at Christ Community Church working with children in the education program lost her husband at age 58. He was not really an observant Catholic but had been baptized and confirmed at St. Pat’s and thus the funeral was there. I know the pastor, a warm, inviting person and was greeted warmly as I entered the sanctuary. “Ave Maria” was being sung. Then the processional, candles and cross and vestments. I was feeling very much at home. The manner of the priest was gracious, warm and embracing – no pomp and circumstance. He even handed out suckers to the few children in attendance The liturgy was followed, but minimally. The homily was given in a friendly nonthreatening, inviting manner. The gospel passage from Matthew 25 about the Sheep and the Goats was read and referred to. The theology was straightforward atonement-centered – Jesus died for our sins – he took our place opening access to God and eternal life. We were all invited to receive the gift of salvation. It is a theology I once held without question but have come to understand quite differently, but it didn’t really matter. The priest’s manner, as I said, was nonthreatening, non-judgmental and very genuine and sincere As I said above, with all of today on my mind, I found the whole experience quite wonderful. The dogmatic framework out of which the priest was speaking did not matter to me. What did matter was his manner, his obvious care for the grieving, his assurances, his goodness and kindness, the affirmation of the deceased and the hope expressed. I sensed that the family and friends were hearing through it all the affirmation – Your loved one is absolutely safe and you are as well. I was quite conscious of that sense pervading the sanctuary, no doubt because I have been reflecting on that declaration as a summation of what in religious parlance we mean by salvation. For me, as for others there, of course, there was not only the beautiful humanity of the priest but also “Ave Maria”, stained glass, the twenty-third Psalm sung and the Gospel read, cross and candles and the beauty of the sanctuary. The Story – the Symbols – the Setting – All of it “speaking” good news – you are absolutely © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem Page12   safe! Safe because your life is held and comprehended by something greater than you, the Ground of Being, experienced through story and symbol – through posture, gesture, vesture, through liturgy and music. I don’t mean to be boastful when I say it takes a great deal of maturity to sense in all of that that one is absolutely safe. It has taken me a lifetime of study and struggle, of questioning and wondering. I really don’t need Bill Maher to tell me religious practice, observance and dogma is all too commonly religulous. Of course it is because we religious folk are not infrequently ridiculous – arrogant, ignorant, tribal, exclusive, dogmatic and judgmental. But religion is not religulous; in its vast variety of expression and observance it is humanizing and elevating, inspiring and a catalyst for the best and the highest of human achievement and nobility. And it functions thus at its best when our human experience in the Presence of that which holds us has assured us we are absolutely safe. O Lord, you have searched me And known me…. Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your Presence?… Search me, O God, and know my heart …and lead me in the way everlasting. For in your Presence, within or “outside”, I am absolutely safe. After the morning experience in the sanctuary, last evening we attended a neighborhood gathering at a home across the street from our own. On our neighbor’s deck, I watched the brilliant sunset as the sun slipped into Lake Michigan, leaving a golden afterglow. Walking home an hour later, darkness had set in and the sky was inky black, but across the vast expanse of heaven’s canopy sparkled myriad stars as diamonds. To the west where the last traces of gold had been erased, the Evening Star was brightly shining; to the south, massive Jupiter could be seen; to the north the Big Dipper twinkled. My heart leapt within me; the words of my favorite mantra came to my awareness: All will be well, All will be well; All manner of things will be well. And I knew I was absolutely safe! References: Paul Tillich. The Shaking of the Foundations, a collection of sermons. © Grand Valley State University �The God We Cannot Flee Richard A. Rhem © Grand Valley State University Page13   � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Scripture Text Psalm 139 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Paul Tillich. The Shaking of the Foundations, a collection of sermons, 1948. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20081019 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-10-19 Title A name given to the resource The God We Cannot Flee Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on October 19, 2008 entitled "The God We Cannot Flee", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Psalm 139. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Immanence of God Nature of Spiritual Experience https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/266624bfcb3bdf1c78188b74f23c5299.pdf 3b7c40d80e6c3b94f0c7a00e59b856e8 PDF Text Text The Human Hunger for God Psalm 42:1-2 Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan September 14, 2008 Prepared text of the sermon For me, the most enjoyable aspect of coming here on these Sunday mornings is the opportunity it affords me to think through seriously some of the dimensions of religious experience and the whole human enterprise of the religious quest. As I have said, I have been on a journey that has brought me from a position of Christian exclusivism, believing salvation was to be found through Jesus Christ alone, to a pluralist understanding that all the great religious traditions that arose in the era around 800 BCE were mediators of the knowledge and experience of the Ultimate, the Absolute, the Sacred Mystery, the One, the real – in my idiom – God. What these Sunday mornings afford me is, in the leisure of retirement from active ministry, the occasion and the joy of looking back over that pilgrimage in light of the continuing contemporary discussions of the phenomenon of religion. I have always found it interesting to find that series I announce at the beginning, in their unfolding, take on a life of their own. I chose to reflect on the poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures – the Psalms as we speak of them – because I am more comfortable with religion in a poetic mode and those utterances have come down to us as profound expressions of the human spirit, expressions of grief, anger, love, praise and deep trust. As I have been working on this series – this is the third of four, I have found myself moving from the expression of a Psalm itself, to reflect on what that expression tells us about the religious quest and the phenomenon of religion in general. In part at least, this adjusted direction has come from encountering an interesting contemporary work entitled Why God Won’t Go Away, whose subtitle is “Brain Science and the Biology of Belief”. The book was recommended to me by Peter Hart who three weeks ago gave a fascinating presentation here about the human brain and the mystical religious experience of unity with the infinite reality. Therefore today I will use Psalm 42 as a poetic expression of the human hunger for God. As a deer longs for flowing streams, So longs my soul for you, O God. © Grand Valley State University   �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 2   My soul thirsts for God, For the living God. When shall I come and behold The face of God? It would appear that the Psalmist was in a situation of exile, cut off from the setting of the Holy Hill of Zion – the Temple, the Altar, the Priesthood – the symbols by which God’s presence, “the face of God” was experienced by him. In that foreign setting he remembers festive worship, the worshipping community and all the joy and fulfillment he found in such religious observance and he confesses his soul is cast down. He talks to himself, trying to encourage his heart that he will yet again praise God, being restored to his spiritual home, while his adversaries taunt him – “Where is your God?” I need do no more with the Psalm beyond hearing the eloquent expression of longing for communion with God, communion mediated with the rich symbols of Israel’s religious celebrations, except to refer to a hymn taken from The Hymnbook, used for years at Christ Community Church: As pants the hart for cooling streams When heated in the chase, So longs my soul, O God, for Thee, And Thy refreshing grace. For Thee, my God, the living God, My thirsty soul doth pine; O when shall I behold Thy face, Thou Majesty divine! Why restless, why cast down, my soul? Trust God; and He’ll employ His aid for thee, and change these sighs To thankful hymns of joy. Why restless, why cast down, my soul? Hope still; and thou shalt sing The praise of Him who is thy God, Thy health’s eternal Spring. A hymn in a Christian Hymnal using the expressions of Israel’s faith tradition – of course the Christian Church is rooted in the faith of Israel so that is not remarkable. Still it is an instance of two great religious traditions where such a hunger and thirst for communion with God is shared. And it is not just Judaism and Christianity; similar expression of longing, yearning for the experience of union and communion with God is expressed in all the great religious traditions. © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 3   In all the traditions there are varying teachings, moral codes, symbols and religious observances, but finally it is union and communion with the Sacred Mystery of Reality that is longed for. This comes especially to expression in the mystical experiences witnessed to in the great majority of religions. This is documented in the work of Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Acquili entitled Why God Won’t Go Away (2002). The authors, by their own testimony, admit they pretty much operated on the organizing principle of science that everything that is real can be measured, and scientific methods are the only measurements that count. Quoting Freud, “Science is not an illusion! An illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give we can get elsewhere.” Thus the reality of the mystics cannot be considered real; it cannot be scientifically verified. This is what they write: Gene and I began, as all scientists do, with the fundamental assumption that all that is really real is material. We regarded the brain as a biological machine, composed of matter and created by evolution to perceive and interact with the physical world. After years of research, however, our understanding of various key brain structures and the way information is channeled along neural pathways led us to hypothesize that the brain possesses a neurological mechanism for self-transcendence. When taken to its extreme, this mechanism, we believed, would erase the mind’s sense of self and undo any conscious awareness of an external world. This hypothesis was later supported by our SPECT scan studies, which began to shed light on the neurological correlates of spiritual experience. In the narrowest scientific view, it would be possible to believe that we had reduced all spiritual transcendence – from the mildest case of religious uplift, to the profound states of union described by mystics – to a neurological commotion in the brain. But our understanding of the brain would not allow us to rest with that conclusion. (p. 145 f) Their experimentation involved wiring the brains of Buddhist monks in meditation and Franciscan nuns at prayer. The SPECT scans gave similar results – recording the brain’s activity during the movement into the mystic experience or the moments of most intensely religious experience or meditation. On the basis of their study they were convinced that the mystical experience is biologically observable and scientifically real. In their words: As our study continued, and the data flowed in, Gene and I suspected that we’d uncovered solid evidence that the mystical experiences of our subjects – the altered states of mind they described as the absorption of © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 4   the self into something larger – were not the result of emotional mistakes or simple wishful thinking, but were associated instead with a series of observable neurological events, which, while unusual, are not outside the range of normal brain function. In other words, mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real. (p. 7) Without attempting to describe their discussion of the anatomy of the brain, a task beyond my competence and purpose, I simply record their conclusion. The inexplicable unity of the biological brain and its ethereal phenomenon of mind is the first aspect of what we have defined as the mind’s mystical potential. The second characteristic, which was hinted at in our SPECT scan studies, is the ability of the mind to interpret spiritual experience as real. This ability, based on the mind’s capacity to enter altered states of consciousness, and to adjust its assessment of reality neurologically, is a fundamental link between biology and religion. (p. 34) What follows, for those interested, is an extended discussion of “Brain Architecture;” for our purposes I jump over that discussion as well as a chapter on myth-making, ritual, mysticism and the origins of religion, to their discussion of the mind’s search for absolutes and their primary claim – “Why God Won’t Go Away.” The authors ask “a provocative question”: “Can all spirituality and any experience of the reality of God be reduced to a fleeting rush of electrochemical blips and flashes, racing along the neural pathways of the brain? Based upon our current understanding of the manner in which the brain turns neural input into the perceptions of human experience, the simplest answer is yes.” (p. 143). But they go on to ask: “Are we saying, then, that God is just an idea, with no more absolute substance than a fantasy or a dream?” They answer that, based on their “best understanding of how the mind interprets the perceptions of the brain, the simplest answer is no.” They reduce the possible conclusions of their work to two: Either spiritual experience is nothing more than a neurological construct created by and contained within the brain, or the state of absolute union that the mystics describe does in fact exist and the mind has developed the capability to perceive it. (p. 147) And, acknowledging that they cannot objectively prove the actual existence of Absolute Unitary Being, nontheless they assert, Our understanding of the brain and the way it judges for us what is real argues compellingly that the existence of an absolute higher reality or © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 5   power is at least as rationally possible as is the existence of a purely material world. (p. 155) Their research led them to the hypothesis with which they worked – “That spiritual experience, at its very root, is intimately interwoven with human biology. That biology, in some way, compels the spiritual urge.” (p. 8) Such a conclusion led the authors to see all religions as branches of the same tree. Whatever the founding vision, whatever the respective paths that lead to the Absolute, the Sacred Mystery, or to God, the same human brain/mind complex is at work. The authors begin their final chapter, “Why God Won’t Go Away” with a poem prayer by C.S. Lewis, the great English literary scholar. At a later age he was convinced of the truth of Christianity, and, in his early years, wrote a rational defense/exposition of the Christian faith tradition. One can find such in his widely popular Mere Christianity. I was greatly surprised to read his poem “A Footnote to All Prayers” – a far different Lewis than was revealed in his early writings. Whether this poem followed the profound grief experience he suffered in the death of his wife whom he had married later in life and chronicled in his work, A Grief Observed, I do not know. In any case the poem is an amazing and beautiful expression: The one whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou And dream of Phaedian fancies and embrace in heart Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing thou art. Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme Worshipping with frail images of folk-lore dream, And all in their praying, self-deceived, address The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert Our arrows, aimed, unskillfully, beyond desert; And all are idolators, crying unheard To a deaf idol, if thou take them at thy word. Take not, O lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great, Unspoken speech our limping metaphor translate. Here is C. S. Lewis acknowledging the respective images, symbols, incarnations by which the respective religions access God all fall short of perfect vision of the One, the Absolute, the Final Reality – our prayers utilize language which are but “limping metaphors”. Our authors comment: The conclusions of the mystics seem clear: God is by his nature unknowable. He is not an objective fact or an actual being; he is, in fact, © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 6   being itself. The absolute, undifferentiated oneness that is the ground of all existence. (p. 159) While thinking about our reflection today, I saw an announcement of a book whose title seemed to indicate a similar claim to the one made by Newberg and D’Aquili but from quite a different perspective. The title, Is There a Universal Grammar of Religion? By Henry Rosemont, Jr. and Huston Smith. Huston Smith is probably the best known authority on World Religion. His 1958 publication on The Religion of Man, later revised as The World’s Religions, changed the way the American public thought about religion. Widely respected and loved, Huston Smith is a world-class scholar and marvelous human being. In 2000 he was our guest in Spring Lake as lecturer for the Center for Religion and Life. The recent work is an expansion of The Fifth Master Huuan Hua Memorial Lecture, including portions added by Smith’s discussion partner, Henry Rosemont, Jr. who wrote an introduction, an initial response, a recorded discussion with Huston Smith and a final reflection. Smith’s lecture is summarized in the Preface: Professor Smith offers, in the present small volume, a final distillation of his lifetime of study, practice, and insight. He describes a Universal Grammar of religion, in which he claims fourteen points of substantial identity among all the great traditions. Since these points, he argues, are universals, it is evident that a capacity to respond to them must belong to the innate psychophysical makeup of human beings. Borrowing language from the generative linguist Noam Chomsky, who was his friend and colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Professor Smith concludes that we are hard-wired with a capacity for religious experience in the same way that Chomsky claims we are hard-wired to speak our native tongues within the constraints of the syntactic patterns that collectively comprise “Universal Grammar.” (p. viii) Smith and Rosemont were colleagues at M.I.T. along with Noam Chomsky who is a leading linguist and has claimed we are hard-wired to speak our native tongues. In his response to Smith’s lecture, Rosemont gives a brief explanation of Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar hard-wired into our brains. Chomsky’s reasoning is straightforward: if there are principles that speakers of a language or dialect demonstrably follow from childhood on, but that were not or could not have been learned solely on the basis of direct linguistic experience or tutoring, then those principles must form part of the cognitive endowment that all normal human beings bring to bear in acquiring their native tongue. And it is the task of theoretical generative linguists to formulate hypotheses about what those highly abstract principles might be, and then “test” those hypotheses by observing linguistic behavior (which might be their own, with the observations introspective). (p. 23) © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 7   Rosemont concludes that Huston Smith is using Chomsky’s claim of human hard wiring for language accurately when he claims the same for human hard wiring for religion. He writes, In the same way, Smith is claiming, if I understand him aright, that human beings have a “capacity” to have intimations of the infinite, to apprehend what is beyond or behind our normal sensory experiences. And the evidence for this claim can be found in the sacred texts and practices of all of the world’s religions, distant from each other in time and space. I believe Smith would call these intimations “religious experiences,” and I would call them that, too… (p. 31) I find it interesting that, while Rosemont stops short of agreeing with Huston Smith’s claims of an ontological reality as the counterpart to the human “intimations of the Infinite”, he nevertheless joins him in understanding the human being as having a capacity to receive such “intimations of the Infinite.” My claim would be that just as we are “hard-wired” to respond in certain ways to human speech – the Universal Grammar – so are we wired equally to feel a sense of belonging in the natural world we experience with our sensory organs. But beyond that I make no ontological commitments, in the same way I do not want to say that nouns, verbs, or linguistic structures of any kind are “out there” apart from human mental organs. Nor would I argue that such a religious response to our environment is or is not in any way adaptive for the species; we just have this capacity for response, that’s all. (p. 47) In his own self-description he writes, I am not a Christian, do not believe in God or gods, am terrified at the possibility of surviving in any way the destruction of my body, and believe the idea of a transcendent realm is not only false, but mischievous, to the extent it causes us to lose sight of the splendor, majesty, and spiritual significance of this world – the only world I believe we will ever know. Thus we have a deeply religious person in Huston Smith claiming a religious capacity is hard wired into the human being and one who does not believe in God who agrees that that native given is indeed part of being human. In his own way Henry Rosemont is religious but his religious experience is limited to this world of nature; it is an inner-human phenomenon with no ontologically existing Higher Order. I make this point because of the parallel to the authors of Why God Won’t Go Away. There, too, no ontological claims were being made beyond the fact that the reality of human religious capacity which is a brain/mind function points to the © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 8   possibility and calls in question the claims of atheistic naturalism that claims only that is real that can be measured by empirical scientific means. I confess my affinity to Huston Smith. In the conversation with Rosemont, Rosemont made the point that although Smith had traveled the world over studying and practicing almost all of the world’s religions, he has remained a Protestant Christian in his childhood Methodist church. Rosemont asked him why, to which in vintage Huston Smith, he replied, “A friend who knows me very well said, ‘Huston, you know full well that the only thing that keeps you in that wishy-washy Methodist church is ancestor worship and filial piety’.” Quoting the Dalai Lama who, when asked about conversion, replied, “Well, it’s best if you can stay in the heritage that raised you because your impulses are just attuned thereto.” As I was thinking about this whole subject I began to wonder about a religious experience that is inner-human and one that has an objective referent. It was the great German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, considered the Father of Protestant Liberalism, who found his evidence for the existence of God in the feeling of absolute dependence. This was the turn from the 18th century – the Age of Enlightenment – to the 19th century. Emmanuel Kant’s epistemological writings had destroyed the traditional proof for the existence of God. Traditional Christian theological claims were seriously challenged and Scriptural authority was coming under siege. Schleiermacher was looking for an alternative foundation for believing in God. He shifted the location of authority from Biblical revelation and church dogma to the human being – the feeling of absolute dependence. This was the initial move but the 19th century saw the rise of modern atheism, pioneered by Ludwig Feuerbach whose projection theory claimed God was the human projection of his own deepest yearnings and virtues on to the screen of reality before which the human then bowed in worship. There was no God out there; God is created by the human in his own image. Taking Feuerbach’s claim for the Truth were Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and finally Fredrick Nietzsche and Nihilism. I bring up Schleiermacher and the trend he initiated by his move to the human as the seat of religious authority because of a comment made by the great Catholic theologian Hans Küng writing of Feuerbach: Was Feuerbach not right to see his philosophy as the end phase of a Protestant theology that – as he thought – long before his time had become an anthropology, so that he needed only to understand and appropriate its real intentions? Does not the danger become apparent at this point of a theology in Schleiermacher’s style, which makes the reality of God dependent on the religious experiences and emotional needs of the devout human subject? But is not the danger also evident of a © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page 9   contemporary “political theology,” which reduces theology to a “critical theory of history” or of “society”? Is it not clear at this point how close we are to atheism if we do not distinguish between theological and anthropological propositions, if we identify man’s interest with God’s, if we one-sidedly stress God’s nonobjectivity, almost see God as absorbed in our neighbor and the mystery of being simply as the mystery of love? (Does God Exist? P. 214) The towering figure of Karl Barth, the theological giant of the 20th century, strongly critiqued Schleiermacher for beginning the movement that transformed theology into anthropology – the movement from the study of God to the study of the human. Barth burst on the 20th century scene, stressing the Word of God, the Word of revelation – God the Wholy Other who addresses us vertically from above. Barth shifted the whole direction of continental theology and greatly impacted Protestant theology in this country as well. The times were right for such a shift to be sure. Europe was in chaos following the First World War and many were seeking “some word from the Lord.” I hear Küng’s warning. I am in awe of the accomplishment of Karl Barth. Yet I find myself going back to Schleiermacher in his attempt to give foundation to religious experience without relying on external authority of ancient book or ancient church and its tradition. I’m not certain how relevant my questions are to the other great religious traditions but they are very real for Christianity, Judaism and Islam – religions of the Book. The contemporary neurological research demonstrates that it is in the right brain that our religious experience is located. The right brain is formed and nurtured by emotional experiences, including religious experience such as liturgy, ritual, ceremony, celebrations – experiences of a worshipping community in which one is “moved”. Our right brains are shaped by symbols, music, movement and sensory data. And here is the problem for especially the Protestant tradition in which I was nurtured – the tradition of Schleiermacher/Feuerbach and in reaction , Karl Barth and the neo-orthodox movement. This has been a left brain enterprise. Finally, the reality of spiritual, religious experience is not a matter of rational deliberation but precisely of letting go of intellectual delineation and allowing oneself to enter the flow of the Spirit. As we are learning from recent brain research, it is the right brain that “lights up” in intense religious experience. I wonder whether, before the knowledge of the human brain was available, the distinction of right brain and left brain, Schleiermacher was not reaching for just such a move – from rational, left brain religious rationality to a right brain centered experience of God. © Grand Valley State University �Human Hunger for God Richard A. Rhem Page10   For this reason I am encouraged by the contemporary effort to ground religious experience in the anatomy of the human. That does not solve the question of the existence of God – the ontological reality of a Being as the counterpoint to our neurological capacity to receive “intimations of the Infinite” or whether those intimations stem from the Sacred Mystery that is contained within the one reality of the natural world. But these, it seems to me, are the critical contemporary points for further enquiry. As for me, I feel most at home with Huston Smith who sees the commonly shared truth of all the great traditions, yet remains in his native spiritual home. That is the beauty of this inter-faith community where one honors all but can be true to one’s own formation, one’s own story, symbols and rituals that trigger the intimations of the Infinite. I do believe the hunger for God is a human universal. That hunger can be stunted, left dormant and for all appearances seem to be absent. But then perhaps some deep experience whether of joy or grief, of illness or good health causes one to wonder about life’s ultimate questions, the whence, the whither of life and the meaning of it all in the meantime. Then one might identify with the Hebrew poet who exclaimed – As the deer longs for flowing streams, So longs my soul for you, O God. Then one might awaken to a hitherto unawakened hunger, and realize, My soul thirsts for God, For the living God. And that longing will be satisfied in the quietude of the soul’s longing. References: Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili. Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. Harry Rosemont, Jr. and Huston Smith. Is There a Universal Grammar for Religion? © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Series Heartfelt Poems Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References Andrew Newberg & Eugene D'Aquili. Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, 2002. Henry Rosemont & Huston Smith. Is There a Universal Grammar for Religion?, 2008. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20080914 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-09-14 Title A name given to the resource The Human Hunger for God Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on September 14, 2008 entitled "The Human Hunger for God", as part of the series "Heartfelt Poems", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Brain Science C.S. Lewis Hans K Mystical experience Schliermacher https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/53ec81a4c2da867379dc793a1d54c8e9.pdf c25d16ccfde77f478201f553088b4202 PDF Text Text When the Heart is Surprised by Hope Lamentations 3:20f Richard A. Rhem Lakeshore Interfaith Community, Mother’s Trust Ganges, Michigan August 10, 2008 Prepared text of the sermon The Psalm to which I direct your attention this morning is actually not in the Psalter but in a writing called Lamentations. To lament is a frequent poetic utterance in the Hebrew Scriptures. There are many Psalms of lament in the Psalter but Lamentations, which you find immediately after Jeremiah, is a writing consisting of five poems – all laments – thus the title Lamentations. Following Jeremiah and because Jeremiah is often called the Weeping Prophet, Lamentations is traditionally attributed to him. However, we really don’t now who the author was. This we know – his is perhaps the most eloquent outpouring of grief ever recorded. And if we are not sure who the author was, we can be certain of the historical situation that called it forth. In the year 587 BCE the Babylonian Imperial Forces successfully moved into Jerusalem, destroying the Royal Residence, the Temple, the city walls and took all but the poor and elderly into captivity to Babylon for what we speak of as the Exile. That event is briefly recorded in II Kings 25:8-12: In the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, in the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon – Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, an official of the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. He burned down the house of Yahweh, and the King’s house; and all the houses in Jerusalem, including every great man’s house, he set on fire and burned. The whole army of the Chaldeans tore down the walls of Jerusalem, all around … The rest of the people who were left in the city, and those who had deserted to the King of Babylon, and the rest of the populace, Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, took to Babylon as prisoners. The captain of the guard left only some of the poorest in the country to tend the vines and farm the land. A commentator on Lamentations describes the tragedy and its implications for Israel thus. It is first of all a recital of the horrors and atrocities that came during the long siege and its aftermath, but beyond the tale of physical suffering it tells of the spiritual significance of the fall of the city. For the ancient © Grand Valley State University   �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 2   people chosen by Yahweh it meant the destruction of every cherished symbol of their election by God. In line after line the poet recalls all the precious, sacred things which had been lost or shattered: the city itself, once “the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth;” the city walls and towers, once the outward sign that “God is in the midst of her;” the King, “the anointed of Yahweh, the breath of our nostrils;” the priests, and with them all festive and solemn worship; the prophets, and with them all visions and the living word of God; the land itself, Israel’s “inheritance” from Yahweh, now turned over to strangers; the people – dead, exiled, or slaves in their own land. Every sign that had once provided assurance and confidence in God was gone. (Anchor Bible, Lamentations, p. xv) The outpouring of grief and pain and human disaster is brought to expression in the five poems found in the Lamentations. My title today is “When the Heart is Surprised by Hope”. Does it strike you as strange that I should attempt such a subject from a writing called Lamentations? Well, if you have wondered about it, you are prepared to hear the most important thing I want to say this morning – namely – that hurt is the home of hope. My intention from the text is to suggest that one of the fascinating aspects of human experience is that it is often when the darkness seems to swallow us up that light breaks through. I wonder why that is the case. I wonder if there is some aspect of the vast cosmic dance and our emerging human experience that points to a source of Grace beyond us that is not at our disposal but yet dawns upon us betimes and is a pointer to a healing dimension in our human journey; might there be a bias for life and healing? The author of Lamentations was wrestling with the human condition marked by intense suffering, spiritual desolation and tragedy. The writer is dismayed – If God is responsible for everything that happens then how could God allow this tragedy to fall upon Jerusalem? Does God not see? Is God absent? But this is not satisfactory given the conception of God he holds. Is it then Israel’s sins? Rebellion? Failing to follow the way of holiness and righteousness? Yes – certainly that was true – but was such total devastation not overkill? And there was not only the conviction that God is in total control but there was also Israel’s conception of God as merciful. Certainly God does not willingly grieve or afflict anyone. This suffering poet cannot understand – We see the clash of deeply held convictions. To read through these five poems is to realize the intimacy of Israel’s relationship to God and one could read it and write it off as hopelessly naïve, primitive. God’s direct control of historical events, God’s intervention governing all the © Grand Valley State University �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 3   occurrences on the human historical scene is no longer possible for us who have come to some understanding of the cosmos, of nature in its unfolding, of natural causation – natural disasters bring grief, suffering, earthquakes, tsunamis, fire, flood – and then tragedy brought on by human pride, arrogance, greed and brutality and more. With the dawning of the modern period, questions of God’s involvement in history and human affairs became a major discussion. The great German thinker Leibnitz wrestled with the problems caused by the evolving of human understanding – the Enlightenment period. He reasoned his way to a conception of “the best of all possible worlds”. Theodicy is the endeavor to justify the ways of God in the world – from our perspective, a rather arrogant human undertaking; yet, at the time, a serious matter with great existential implications. But then a disaster struck – the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. It is described in a Wikipedia piece: The 1755 Lisbon earthquake, also known as the Great Lisbon Earthquake, took place on November1, 1755 at around 9:40 in the morning. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami and fire, which caused near-total destruction of Lisbon, Portugal and adjoining areas. Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the Richter scale, with an epicenter in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 km (120 mi) westsouthwest of Cape St. Vincent. Estimates place the death toll between 60,000 to 100,000 people, making it one of the most destructive earthquakes in history. Effect on society and philosophy The earthquake had wide-ranging effects on the lives of the populace and intelligentsia. The earthquake had struck on an important Catholic holiday and had destroyed almost every important church in the city, causing anxiety and confusion amongst the citizens of a staunch and devout Catholic city and country, which had been a major patron of the Church. Theologians and philosophers would focus and speculate on the religious cause and message, seeing the earthquake as a manifestation of the anger of God. The earthquake and its fallout strongly influenced the intelligentsia of the European Age of Enlightenment. The noted writer-philosopher Voltaire used the Earthquake in Candide and in his Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne (“Poem on the Lisbon disaster”). Voltaire’s Candide attacks the notion that all is for the best in this, “the best of all possible worlds”, a world closely supervised by a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a salutary counterexample. As Theodor Adorno wrote, “the earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the © Grand Valley State University �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 4   theodicy of Leibnitz” (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe that transformed European culture and philosophy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, whose severity he believed was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for a more naturalistic way of life. So 1755 was a pivot point in the understanding of God’s direct involvement in natural disasters, historical movements and human affairs generally. It was no longer possible to engage with the poet of Lamentations in his dialogue with the Deity. Granted that. Granted that it was no longer possible to understand God pushing the buttons and pulling the levers of the universe. Nonetheless, the issue with which the author was wrestling was real. And the point I am interested in lifting up this morning is the unexpected, amazing breakthrough of hope in the midst of the darkness. The poet is bereft of any solution to his anguish. But then suddenly, unexpectedly, we hear him say: My soul continually thinks of it And is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, And therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end; They are new every morning; Great is Thy faithfulness – From which there comes a beautiful old familiar hymn by that name. And he goes on: The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, To the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly For the salvation of the Lord. There you have it – to wait is to wait in expectation – to hope – the surprise of Grace – Sometimes the heart is surprised by hope. But this beautiful witness to hope, to the steadfast love of God, to a God of infinite mercy comes from one whose conception of God was quite different from ours – Can we reject his conception of God and divine action and still hold to his witness to the Surprise of Grace? That is really the issue this morning; that is the question I invite you to reflect on with me. I suggest that hope is grounded in the reality of our universe and thus © Grand Valley State University �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 5   we are surprised by hope and hope manifests itself most often in times of deep distress and hurt. In fact, as I claim above, Hurt is Hope’s Home. That is a suggestion of the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann – Hurt is Hope’s Home. As I was reflecting on this I was reminded of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled. It was 30 years ago that the book was published and for at least two decades it remained on the Best Seller List – which I suspect is an indication that there is a great hunger for hope and Peck addressed a deeply felt need in our human experience. And experience is what he based his claim that there is a Grace that comes to us from beyond ourselves. Out of his psychiatric practice he discovered again and again the amazement of Grace operating in the human being. He writes: “The fact that there exists beyond ourselves and our conscious will a powerful force that nurtures our growth and evolution is enough to turn our notions of self-insignificance topsy-turvy. For the existence of this force (once we perceive it) indicates with incontrovertible certainty that our human spiritual growth is of the utmost importance to something greater than ourselves. This something we call God. The existence of grace is prima facie evidence not only of the reality of God but also of the reality that God’s will is devoted to the growth of the individual human spirit. What once seemed to be a fairy tale turns out to be the reality.” (p. 311) William Styron, the author of Sophie’s Choice who died recently, wrote his own story of suffering deep depression. He called it darkness visible. With the literary gift he possessed he wrote a moving chronicle of his experience with depression and, although he did not relate his experience to our question this morning, he witnessed to Peck’s claim precisely. He said to those battling deep depression – “I can only tell you – one day the cloud lifted.” Peck would say – “the amazement of Grace.” One can simply leave it there, or one can name that reality as does Peck and call it the miracle of Grace – that hope dawns in the midst of our darkness – and point to a truth of our cosmic reality – and name it God. My intention this morning is to celebrate the surprising claim that though Hurt is Hope’s Home, Hope Happens and Hope Heals. I am reminded of a close friend of mine from College and Seminary and years together in the Reformed Church. He went on to become General Secretary of the RCA, Deputy Secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva and then General Secretary of the National Council of Churches in the U.S. In his midfifties he decided to return to the pastorate but then was diagnosed with cancer. I visited him shortly before he died. He was remarkably at peace. He shared some © Grand Valley State University �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 6   of his journal writings, now published as “Overcoming the Threat of Death: A Journal of One Christian’s Encounter with Cancer.” He tells about how he was about to edit his favorite sermon on his favorite text, a favorite of mine as well. A sermon called “Faith in Spite of Everything,” and it is based on those wonderful words from Habakkuk, “Though there be no grapes on the vine and no cattle in the stall, and all will be lost, nonetheless I will exalt in God my Saviour.” Arie says that up and down the land he preached that sermon on that text “Faith in Spite of Everything,” and then, in his encounter with cancer, he began to see that there was something even beyond faith for him. Growth in grace was represented by an experience of hope. He says, “These days I hold out little hope for my cancer to be cured. I haven’t given up, but the statistics steadily weigh ever more heavily against it. In spite of that I find my feelings of hope undiminished. How do I explain this even within the household of faith, to say nothing of a skeptical world? How do I keep people from feeling as they read this that I am clutching at a straw, deceiving myself, using hope as a form of escapism from the harsh reality of terminal illness and death? How do I communicate that in truth we do not sorrow as those who do not have hope? What is this hope that abides in spite of everything? What form does it take? To me this experience of ‘Hope in Spite of Everything’ is even more important than the experience of faith, in spite of everything. I don’t know how to explain that.” Arie Brower was a thoughtful enough Christian to know that there was no way in the world he could prove to anyone that his hope was not simply illusion. But he witnessed to an indomitable hope so that, as he says in another place, “I hope you understand that I’ve been healed of cancer,” even though cancer took his life. Hurt is Hope’s Home Hope Happens. And from widespread testimony – Hope Heals. This was the center of biblical faith. It has been affirmed in modern clinical experience. It is widely witnessed to in many ways. Hope is not a denial of the darkness nor downplaying of the pain. Scott Peck begins his book with the simple statement: “Life is difficult”, and it is. There is enough pain to go around. But the counsel of our writer this morning is to wait – wait as in expectation. With every sunrise I love to remember those marvelous words and the image © Grand Valley State University �Heart Surprised by Hope Richard A. Rhem Page 7   His mercies are new every morning. The English poet William Cowper, 1731-1800, was a fragile youth who suffered and spent 18 months in an insane asylum. He had a spiritual experience. He was invited by John Newton to come to his parish in Olney, England. He was England’s most honored poet between Pope and Shelley. With Newton he gathered 349 hymns for the Olney Hymnal. Out of this deep experience of darkness and light he wrote: “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; It is the Lord, who rises with healing in His wings: When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again A season of clear shining to cheer it after rain. And in “God Moves In a Mysterious Way”: Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; The clouds ye so much dread Are big with mercy, and shall break In blessings on your head. Such eloquent testimony tells the story: Hurt is Hope’s Home But Hope Happens And Hope Heals Because we who are hard-wired for God live in a universe which has a Bias for Life. References: M. Scott Peck. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. Touchstone, 25th Anniversary edition, 2003. © Grand Valley State University � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Richard A. Rhem Collection Description An account of the resource Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar. Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Religion Interfaith worship Sermons Sound Recordings Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhem, Richard A. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a> Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kaufman Interfaith Institute Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Text Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01 Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1981-2014 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource audio/mp3 text/pdf Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Event Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering Scripture Text Lamentations 3:20 Location The location of the interview Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges References M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, 2003. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context KII-01_RA-0-20080810 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2008-08-10 Title A name given to the resource When the Heart is Surprised by Hope Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Richard A. Rhem Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a> Subject The topic of the resource Clergy--Michigan Reformed Church in America Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.) Sermons Relation A related resource Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/ Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Description An account of the resource A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 10, 2008 entitled "When the Heart is Surprised by Hope", on the occasion of Lakeshore Interfaith Gathering, at Lakeshore Interfaith Center, Ganges. Scripture references: Lamentations 3:20. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Lemmen Library and Archives Hope Theodicy