An Oxygen Tent In West Michigan

I thought of the title for today’s sermon a few weeks ago. “An Oxygen Tent in West Michigan.” But I couldn’t remember how to spell the word “oxygen.” My wife was in the next room, so I called out, “Honey, how do you spell ‘oxygen’?” She spelled out, “O-X-Y-G-E-N.” I said, “Thanks.” Then she said, “Why, are you having trouble breathing?” I said, “Yes, I’m having trouble breathing and I thought: if only I could spell the word ‘oxygen,’ my lungs would clear up.”

I told my daughter that story, she’s a sophomore at the University of Michigan. I thought she’d find it amusing, but her reaction was, “You didn’t know how to spell ‘oxygen’?!”

Back when I was in college, I didn’t go to church much at all. Then for a few years after college, I didn’t go to church much at all either. Even when I got my first job right out of college (does anyone get a job these days right out of college?), I was hired as the news director at a Christian radio station, even with that, I didn’t go to church every Sunday. Just about every Monday, my boss would ask me how things were yesterday at my “Bedroom Baptist Church.” Yeah, I slept in, what can I say?

I did get invited a couple of times when I was in college to go to church with some folks and I went. The first time I went, the minister talked about, “a Lutheran theologian, if you can imagine such a thing,” and everybody laughed. I thought, are they making fun of Luther? At that time I didn’t know a whole lot about church history, but I thought: well, if it wasn’t for Luther, wouldn’t we all be Catholics? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I say that because I’m an interfaith, ecumenical kind of guy.)

Later I got invited back to that same church and the preacher talked about, “those heathen Jews in Hollywood.” What? Did I hear that right? What was even worse was that people were taking notes in their Bibles – “those heathen Jews in Hollywood.” Oy vey!

A year or so ago I was meeting with some Christian ministers. One of the Christian ministers said, “We all have something in common!” Another minister piped up, “Yeah, we preach what we don’t believe!” I thought, we preach what we don’t believe? I don’t preach what I don’t believe. I’ve never preached what I don’t believe. Now granted there are times when one Sunday I believe one thing and then a week later I believe just the opposite, but I believe each one. But I knew what they meant. They meant that they had to preach an Easter sermon in which they said that Jesus was physically resurrected. Well, I would never preach that. They meant, I think, that around Christmas time, they had to preach about how Jesus was born of a virgin. Well, I don’t preach that either, which is probably why I am no longer a Christian minister. But I can’t help wondering, how many ministers are there who preach what they don’t believe? They have to preach a Sunday School theology, but they haven’t believed that since they were in Sunday School. But they have to preach it to keep their jobs.

Then I got to wondering how many people in the pews listen to sermons that they don’t believe. They hear sermons about a Sunday School theology that they left behind when they left Sunday School years before.

Then I got to thinking that well, there are other preachers who preach, unfortunately, what they do believe – things like God hates gays, things like women are inferior to men. Or they preach that God loves the rich and hates the poor. Or they preach that the earth is 6,000 years old. Really? They obviously don’t believe scientists that tell us the earth is billions of years old. They obviously don’t believe the Big Bang theory. They obviously have never even seen “The Big Bang Theory” on CBS on Thursday nights.

After I didn’t go to church during college and a few years after, I found a church that I did go to, faithfully. Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, where I went for fifteen years before I went into the ministry. Fountain Street Church has been, as you probably know, a liberal church for 150 years. For the last 60 years or so the senior ministers at Fountain Street Church have been Unitarian Universalists. I don’t think a minister at Fountain Street Church has ever preached what he or she doesn’t believe. I thought when I was there that Fountain Street Church was, for me, an oxygen tent in West Michigan. It was a place I could come every Sunday after breathing the religiously repressive air that permeates West Michigan. I could come and get my spiritual lungs filled up with intellectual enlightenment and spiritual sanity.

William Ellery Channing, as you know, was a guiding light in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. William Ellery Channing says, “I call that mind free, which accepts light from whencesoever it may come.” We all need to do that. That’s what a church should be all about, is to be the light of truth for everyone.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” That’s what a church should be, is a light: A light of honesty and truth and love and peace for all the world.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave, a great orator and writer, a leader of the anti-slavery movement back in the 1800s. Frederick Douglass said, “Freedom is not a gift. Freedom is won through relentless effort.” A church should be about freedom for people who are enslaved in dogma and doctrine they no longer believe in.

The Dalai Lama says, “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” That’s a value I think this church could embrace, a religion of kindness. This church, this spiritual community, does not require people to recite doctrines or dogmas or creeds or codes that they don’t believe in. This spiritual community gives people freedom to believe what their conscience, what their reason, what their intellect tells them is right. That’s a basic value of this spiritual community. It doesn’t matter what we say so much as what we do. It’s not so much what we believe, but how we act. It’s not about the talk we talk, it’s about the walk we walk. That’s a value this spiritual community holds dear, I think.

A church is not a museum for dusty old doctrines and dogma; it’s a living, breathing spiritual place for people to live fully alive, for people to live fully aware, for people to live fully awake and free. I used to be a news reporter and occasionally I would report on a house fire. Every now and then we’d hear about how somebody would go running into a burning house to save a family member. But I’ve never heard of anybody, I’ve never reported on anybody, running into a burning house to save a family Bible. That’s another value I think we hold, I think everybody holds, but they really won’t admit it because they’re afraid they’ll be struck by lightning or something, that people matter more than a Bible, that a human being matters more than words on a page. That’s a value, I think, that we hold dear.

Jesus said to his disciples they should go proclaim the Good News: the kingdom of heaven has come near. What he meant by that, I think I’ve mentioned this before, was that heaven doesn’t just exist somewhere over the rainbow, it exists here below the rainbow, too. That it doesn’t just exist in the hereafter, but in the here and now. That there aren’t two separate worlds – the world of heaven and the world of earth – it’s all one, it’s all sacred, holy, divine. If that’s too religious for folks, it’s all precious, special, wonderful. Either the priest and the prostitute live in the holy, the sacred, the divine world, or neither of them does. There isn’t a secular and a sacred world; it’s all one world. We’re all one. I think that’s another value that we hold dear.

I get a kick out of it when people say that I do what I do before the Holland City Council when asking them to pass a gay rights ordinance because I’m looking for free publicity to grow my churches. Let me tell you, if you want to grow a church, you don’t do it by proclaiming gay rights. If I wanted to grow a megachurch, I would preach on Sunday morning, “God hates gays.” And I’d have people hanging from the rafters, as other megachurches do and TV churches do. If I wanted to grow a megachurch, I’d preach on Sunday morning that God thinks women are inferior to men, and I’d have people hanging from the rafters. Unfortunately many of them would be women. That’s what other megachurches do, that’s what they do on TV churches. If I wanted to grow a megachurch, I’d preach that God loves rich people and hates poor people. That’s what megachurches and TV churches do and they have people hanging from the rafters. If I wanted to grow a megachurch, I would proclaim that the earth is 6,000 years old and I’d have people hanging from the rafters. That’s what megachurches do, and TV churches, too.

But if I did that, I’d be preaching what I don’t believe. So, I’m stuck with a couple of little churches, but I’m OK with that.

This church, this spiritual community, is a beacon of freedom in West Michigan for people who feel they are enslaved by doctrines and dogmas, that probably even their preachers don’t believe. This church, this spiritual community, is a life preserver in the waters of religious repression that people are drowning in. This church, this spiritual community, is an oxygen tent in West Michigan for people whose spiritual air is polluted by hatred and ignorance.

When I was finished writing this sermon, or when I thought I was finished, I realized that I didn’t quote a song and I usually quote a song in all my sermons. But one didn’t come to me. But then it did and I’ll tell you what it is in a second. If this spiritual community is something that you value – because of the music, the beauty, the silence, the education, even the words spoken in the sermon – tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your co-workers, tell your family. Invite them to come here if they’re stuck in a pew listening to words they don’t believe, listening to a Sunday School theology they gave up back in Sunday School. Invite them here. Tell them that this is a place for them to think for themselves, where we don’t ask them to leave their brains at the door, where we invite them to forge their own theology using their intellect, their reason, their heart, their soul. If you find this place valuable, I imagine that you know other people who would, too. Invite them to come here. In other words, “Go, tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere.”