Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

The True Source of Salvation

 

Reverend Amy Zucker Morgenstern
December 24, 2006
Palo Alto, CA

Walk with me through an art museum for a few moments. Let’s stroll through the Renaissance wing, looking at the paintings of the Madonna and Child. There are Italian-looking Madonnas holding their babies in front of a Tuscan landscape … blond Madonnas painted by Dutch artists in a northern setting … Almost all of them exude a sense of peace and well-being. Sometimes mother and child are smiling at each other, sometimes Mary is pensive, sometimes the baby is playing …

And then, once in a while, we come across one in which the baby Jesus is gripping a cross, as another child would hold a rattle. Or he is being visited by the child John the Baptist, who holds a crucifix for him to see: the baby looks up at it, entranced. Often there is a lamb nearby, as if to remind us of the sacrifice soon to take place. These paintings seem to say, “This is the purpose for which this child was born. He was born for death.”

Proverbs of Ashes, the source of today’s reading, was written by two Christians, a minister and a theologian, who had been taught that sacrifice was central to their religion, was in fact the central purpose of Jesus’ life and the core image of their faith, and who began to question this. The lesson they had each taken away from their upbringing and education was that suffering is redemptive and violence the key to salvation: that Jesus on the cross is a model for each of us to follow. But then Reverend Parker found herself in the parish counseling women who remained with men who hurt them and threatened their lives, many of whom stayed to the death because they believed that their suffering, like Jesus’s, was the will of God. Professor Brock was trying to write a theology about “the life-giving spirit of God in every person” but kept coming up against the contradictory teaching that “Jesus incarnated God by dying.” ¹ Both of them began to reflect on their own lives, which had been scarred by racism and sexual and physical abuse. And they became convinced that their religion, in Brock’s words, “could not promise healing for victims of intimate violence as long as its central image was a divine parent who required the death of his child.” ² That it needed to be able to promise such healing if it were to be a route to true salvation, “not only as forgiveness for sinners but as healing for … the brokenhearted.” ³ Did their religion offer a way out — did it offer salvation? They began to question what the word meant.

William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, and former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, reflected recently in the UU World on what he had learned from being immersed in the nightmare world of torture for the past twelve years. “Is what I preach to people sufficient to encompass a world in which such coarseness and brutality exists?” he asked himself, as Brock and Parker had asked. ⁴

For us to be able to say yes, it’s important that our religion take suffering seriously. As Schulz said when addressing his ministerial colleagues in St. Louis last June,

I find it a helpful exercise to use torture as a plumbline test of the adequacy of my worldview and sophistication of my sermonizing. I remember a cartoon from years ago in which the wayside pulpits of an Episcopal church and a Unitarian Universalist church were both visible on a street corner. It was Easter and the title of the Episcopal rector’s Easter sermon was “The Truth and Power of the Risen Christ” while across the street the Unitarian Universalist was preaching a sermon entitled “Upsy-Daisy.” My point is simply that to my mind an “upsy-daisy” theology fails the torture test. ⁵

I could not agree more, and I believe that the problem of pain is one that every religion worth its salt, every life worth living, must engage. You hear me preach about it quite a bit. It is what drew me to Buddhism years ago: the Buddha’s frank acknowledgement of suffering as one of the persistent facts of life.

Christianity can be just as candid about the nature of suffering. Many people shudder when they walk into a Catholic church and see a life-size sculpture of a recently executed man hanging high above the altar. But you have to hand it to the Catholics: they put the great problem of pain right there, literally front and center in their religion.

But I do question whether that part of the Christian story is where salvation is to be found: our salvation, the salvation we each need from a way of being in which we are the tortured, the torturers, or the witnesses to torture — which is where we live right now. The Universalists rebelled against the idea of redemptive suffering long ago. They questioned the doctrine of “substitutionary atonement,” the mechanism by which Jesus, through his willing self-sacrifice, redeemed us all from the consequences of our misdeeds. They rejected a God that would arrange such a deal, and cried out against the perversity of calling that God loving. A truly loving God would be appalled by the suffering of an innocent — never demand it.

Did we leave that theology of redemptive suffering behind? Is it the stuff of the 19^th century? I’m not so sure. Don’t we live as if suffering is a part of the way things must be? Don’t we live as if the suffering of some can and does redeem the rest of us?

One of our challenges is not to give in to cynicism: the belief that life must be nasty, brutish and short for most people, that this is a dog-eat-dog world and we’re lucky to be among the eaters instead of the eaten. To resist the myth of redemptive suffering means to reject the benefits we are given by the suffering of others. After I published a blurb on fair-trade and sustainable chocolate in the Bulletin, Sonya Raymakers sent me the most inspiring note. She said that she has created a website for chocolate lovers who want chocolate that is not produced at the expense of other people, such as enslaved children. Next Sunday and the Sunday after, she will be staffing a table out on the patio to tell us more. For those who don’t know her, Sonya is a high school student who recently participated in our Coming of Age program and rite of passage. She is not willing to let others suffer so that we can benefit. She is trying to make a difference, and leading others in making a difference.

Even here in the 21^st century and in a religion that long ago discarded substitutionary atonement as a cruel myth, is a constant challenge not to accept exactly these transactions as political realities. I’m sure we all read the papers and wonder if there is any way short of war to deal with a government like Iran’s or North Korea’s. We see Iraq as a quagmire but we may think the consequences of leaving would be worse. We don’t want to advocate violence, but we think it might be necessary — that is, we think some might have to die so that others may live. And why shouldn’t we? All our lives, violence has been the most popular solution to these kinds of problems, despite the many peacemakers, including Jesus himself, who have pointed to another way.

And redemptive suffering shows up sometimes in our own lives, when, in the quieter choices we make, we sacrifice ourselves. Parker tells the chilling story of having aborted a much-wanted and planned-for pregnancy because her husband decided he could not handle having a child after all. “The gesture of sacrifice was familiar,” she writes. “I knew the rubrics of the ritual by heart: you cut away some part of yourself, then peace and security are restored, relationship is preserved … ” ⁶ What part of ourselves have we sacrificed in the belief that it would preserve love or make someone else happy?

If we do not want to accept that suffering is the route to redemption, if we want to find salvation from suffering for ourselves and everyone, we have another teaching to guide us. There is a teaching that says that we can transform this world into one of peace and justice, as the angels sing, of “peace on earth, good will to all.” That transformation, the source of that salvation, in the Christian story is right here at Christmas, the festival of birth, the holiday that puts a baby at the center of the celebration, the center of a religion.

Suffering, sorrow and death are still a part of Jesus’s story. Of course they are. We know, looking at the baby in the painting, singing of the baby in the carols, that he will soon grow to be a young and fearless prophet whose teaching will bring about his death at age 33. We know this. But it is one thing to recognize that execution is the end of the story and quite another to say that it is the moral and the point. It was not the fulfillment of his purpose, just a fact of his life. The paintings I described are a problem not because they remind us that this child’s life will end in a too-early, painful death, but because they salute that death as the purpose of the life, the very thing that gives it its meaning, the reason the child was born.

Christmas is the holiday of birth. It celebrates the parent who gives life, not the one who demands it back as a sacrifice. There is sacrifice in tonight’s story, oh yes. The young woman, poor, judged harshly for her apparent pregnancy out of wedlock. The man who accepted her and her child and married her. The long journey on a donkey’s back just before childbirth; the birth itself, in a shabby stable, on hay and straw, a place too rough for a young girl to dwell in, much less to undergo the pain of labor. There is sacrifice here, but it is the parents’, not the child’s. The gift of life comes to him as it should, granted freely, and with celebration and blessing.

And the life that he will now live, the life he packs into a mere 30-odd years, is also one of blessing. His most famous sermon will be one of blessing, of beatitude. He will bring good news to the poor, the outcast, the despised. He will be a man on a mission, and his mission, he will tell his students, tell us, in no uncertain terms, is all of ours: to visit the imprisoned (whatever reason they are there), clothe the naked, feed the hungry, bring healing to the sick, house the homeless. Like his mother at Christmas, he will give life. He will teach everyone who hears his words and everyone who reads them down the centuries how to be saved. The secret is in how we live — in whether we choose life.

Parker and Brock warn us not to walk down the path they walked, where the key to salvation is to suffer willingly, to believe that suffering comes from God. Suffering might be part of our fate, as it was Jesus’s, but it is never just. We may extract meaning from it, but it is never “meant to be” — not by anyone who loves us. It is never ordained by anything that is holy. It is not the source of salvation, whether it is our own pain, or the pain of Jesus on the cross, or the pain of a child in Africa who pours out his blood that others might have delicacies, or that of a woman in the Tenderloin who spends a December night on the street that others might make a good return on their housing investment, or that of a young man barely out of an American high school who runs through sniper fire in the streets of Baghdad so that others might have cheap gasoline.

Suffering happens, but it does not save us. What save us, according to the Christmas story, are love, beauty, and compassion. The love that endures pain to bring forth life, that holds the newborn baby so tenderly, that smiles with a parent’s adoration. The beauty of that new life, of a child just entering the world, one of the most beautiful creatures we know. The fierce compassion that will soon make the young Jesus stand with the outcast and the poor and challenge each of us to do the same. The life this baby is embarking upon, beginning tonight, and carrying on through the next thirty years and then the next twenty centuries. He has something urgent to teach us today, not because of how he died, but because of how he lived.

If we dare to live the same way, even in some small measure, we can transform this world into the one of which the angels sang. Tonight’s celebration is a celebration of life: the life that Jesus, as he grows to adulthood, will demand from a society where the occupying soldiers walk every street and death seems to hold sway, aided by its allies, poverty, injustice, and violence. He will say to his people, “Yes, you live in a land where suffering is all around you. It may always be around you. Your calling, like mine, is to bring love where there is hatred, or just as bad, indifference.” He says it to us, today, on Christmas.

What will we do about the suffering we witness? We can give in to despair because it is so immense and we, like newborn babes ourselves, are so small and helpless, or we can do what can be done in the span of one life to alleviate it. We can shrug our shoulders and accept the fruits of other people’s pain, or we can seek another way.

Salvation is not in the cross the baby Jesus clutches — it is not in pain and death, though they are always with us, but in the baby himself, the miracle of a newborn life. For each of us, it lies in how much life we bring into this cold, harsh world through our acts of compassion and love. Like Mary, like Jesus, we can take the suffering life deals out and transform it, through love, into life and hope. May this blessing of Christmas be with us every day, in all that we do, in all that we are.

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