Blasphemy As A Sign of Your Religion

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 3^rd of February, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
after a surprising week that anticipated spring
to worship, to tell the truth in many ways
with words, with silence, with beauty, with music.
On this gift called earth we live and worship,
each person equally far from our star, the sun,
each person, a citizen of the world.
To love the world more, each cloud and rock
and all its citizens; this our goal, our urgency.

And at worship's end,
(all) may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become.

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

As we breath in this place and hour, others breath in this hour but not in this place.

Just down the street, right now, at the McDonald's on High, Stephen Cort, the Sunday AM manager, is steamed because the young man he just hired a week ago is late again; this the third time.

Out in Oakland CA, right now, Carlos Santana (not the musician, he always has to say) finds that the winter birds have woken him early again, woken him into his dread, wondering how he will pay his electric bill this month. He suddenly remembers that it's Superbowl Sunday, and smiles, thankful for the distraction from his ever-present worry.

Over in Manila, Magdalena Tengay has just about fallen asleep right now this Sunday night when she hears her brother Silvio coming in drunk again. She knows he has probably lost a lot of money down at that awful backroom gambling place near the library called Isla Negros. She knows that the news of military action this week has made her brother all the more reckless. She bites her arm and begins to weep quietly, so as not to wake up her mother.

In Myanmar, on the cliffs near Sittwe, an 18-year- old monk right now looks out at the Andaman Sea and notes that the growling of his stomach strangely blends with the distant sounds of the waves gliding onto the beach.

In Kazhakhstan, right now, in the small town of Kzyl-Orda on the Syrdarya River, a man named Muhammed Ganda talks with his wife 'Ayesha over afternoon tea about the new government program out of Alma Ata that proposes to end the practice of capital punishment gradually. "How will they do that?" he wonders.

In Brazzaville Congo right now, the rich supper scent of cooking groundnuts blends with the bitter stench of recent volcanic smoke penetrating everywhere. Alfonsina Sembe wonders why the pastor at the Mission Church calls this an "act of God." "Why would God do such a thing?" she wonders.

In Jamaica Plain, Massachesetts, Kim says to her partner Anita, "When is a good night that we can show Mark our slides of Patagonia. He's coming into town this week, you know, for that meeting of his. I think he has Wednesday night and Sunday night free. Sunday OK?"

O Love, as the earth turns forever, remind us of how small our portion is, and how precious our small lives are. Bestow us to silence that we might be aware of who we are in this world, and never, never hide behind our smallness.

silence

Each of us knows folks around the world, in this country or another, far or near, that beckon to our heart daily or inhabit it as a beacon of joy or sorrow. These people we are free to name aloud or in silence as a way of reminding us that our small stories are bound up with the small stories of all others who live on this earth.

naming

I would honor you with a handful of stars if I could, or spread the cloths of heaven under your feet as a precious gift, but today I have given you my dreams. They are precious as stars, or the indigo cloths of heaven; as beautiful, as a great choir singing light alive.

(based on the choir text of William Butler Yeats.)

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the book Blasphemy, written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Leonard Levy, 9 years ago.

In times past, the rejection of God by a heathen or of the divinity of Jesus by a Jew might unleash a criminal prosecution. There never was a time when only a person raised as a Christian could commit the crime of blasphemy against Christianity by denying the Trinity or some Christian dogma. Even in Leviticus, the blasphemer (in the story) was a non-Jew. In law and religion, only a believer could be a heretic, but anyone, even an unbeliever, could blaspheme. Historically, blasphemy has been a complex offense whose dragnet has ensnared people of no or little faith as well as the unorthodox faithful. At various times in the past, blasphemy was nearly indistinguishable from the crimes of idolatry, sacrilege, heresy, obscenity, profanity, sedition, treason, and breach of the peace. The meaning of blasphemy has ranged from the ancient Hebrew crime of cursing the ineffable name of God to the modern crime of ridiculing or professing atheistic principles in a way that insults the religious feelings of others. Blasphemy is not just an irreligious crime; political considerations have often tinged prosecutions, as have considerations of public order and morality. Universalist preacher Abner Kneeland, for example, would never have been prosecuted if he had not been a radical social reformer.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the great Nobel Laureate, Wislawa Szymborska. This poem was originally published in the Polish Journal, Arkusz.

The Silence of Plants

A one-sided relationship is developing quite well between you and me.
I know what a leaf, petal, kernel, cone, and stem are,
and I know what happens to you in April and December.

Though my curiosity is unrequited,
I gladly stoop for some of you,
and for others I crane my neck.

I have names for you:
maple, burdock, liverwort,
eather, juniper, mistletoe, and forget-me-not;
but you have none for me.

After all, we share a common journey.
When traveling together, it's normal to talk,
exchanging remarks, say, about the weather,
or about the stations flashing past.

We wouldn't run out of topics
for so much connects us.
The same star keeps us in reach.
We cast shadows according to the same laws.
Both of us at least try to know something,
each in our own way,
and even in what we don't know
there lies a resemblance.

Just ask and I will explain as best I can:
what it is to see through my eyes,
why my heart beats,
and how come my body is unrooted.

But how does someone answer questions
which have never been posed,
and when, on top of that
the one who would answer
is such an utter nobody to you?

Undergrowth, shrubbery,
meadows, and rushes…
everything I say to you is a monologue,
and it is not you who's listening.

A conversation with you is necessary
and impossible,
urgent in a hurried life
and postponed for never.

Sermon: Blasphemy as a Sign of Our Religion [Next][back to top]

Early last year, I was walking through a bookstore in Boston, and I came upon a gigantic book with a very strange cover and even stranger title.

The cover shows a photograph of Andres Serrano's infamous piece of art, the piece which is basically a conventional crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist's own urine. It was one of a whole series of avant-garde artworks deemed blasphemous in certain quarters, charges that almost brought down entirely, you may remember, the National Endowment for the Arts, which had originally funded Serrano.

I have to admit I was put off by the clearly disturbing image on the cover, and decided to pick the huge volume up and thumb through it. I did this not so much because of the cover, but because the idea that anyone could write such a large book on such an arcane and antique subject genuinely surprised me. Especially with a cover like that.

Ah, but wouldn't you know it? I really shouldn't have been surprised. Almost fifty percent of the examples of blasphemy given in the book are about our own Unitarian Universalist history and ancestors. Arius of Alexandria is there, and Miguel Servet at the stake, and all the other radical Anabaptist martyrs burned for blaspheming the Trinity and divinity of Jesus. Our Katherine Weigel (Katarina Weiglowa) is there, an 80-year-old Polish woman who was burned alive for questioning the Trinity, thus blaspheming God according to the laws of the era. There is a whole chapter devoted to our Socinian ancestors and Hungarian speaking forebears, who bore exile, prison and even death for questioning the theological status quo. The English Unitarians are there in great number. I'm sad to say that for several hundred years in England you could have been easily imprisoned or even executed just for expressing, without shame, Unitarian ideas in a casual conversation at the local pub.

It's not just ancient history either, this lengthy tale of blasphemy. We zany United States types are there in rank and file, since blasphemy laws have been on our books for over two centuries. And listen, I'm not just talking about red-faced, angry fundamentalists shouting at people in line to see Scorsese's uneven film "The Last Temptation of Christ." I am talking about us. We North American Unitarians and Universalists, I mean. For the most interesting story in the book tells us how the Universalists, supported by many Unitarians, actually held the last legal trial for blasphemy ever conducted on these shores.

The blasphemous person in question is mentioned by name in the passage Earl read from Leonard Levy's Blasphemy, the book that wowed me. His name was Abner Kneeland, and he was an agitated, brilliant, way-ahead-of-his-time and also very feisty Universalist minister. Back in the early 1800's, after turning from his Baptist upbringing, he took up the Universalist gospel. He served congregations in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Because of his undeniable language skills, he also served as an editor of several Universalist publications. Slowly but surely, due to his study and associations with radical friends, his head began to brim over with doubts about the then universally accepted divine origin of the Bible. Eventually, Kneeland began to preach in his own pulpit that the Bible was creative literature, not plain fact. He decried the resurrection and birth stories of Jesus, claiming that they were completely fictitious in their present form. He started to hang around with Mr. Robert Owen and Ms. Frances Wright, two of the most articulate and radical freethinkers of the 19th or any century. Eventually, in a Universalist publication called The Investigator, Kneeland wrote the following words. "Universalists believe in a god I do not, (it's) nothing more than….their own imagining."

What he meant by this, he says, is that he had come to view the world and God as the same thing. He had become, in short, a Pantheist, the fancy word for someone who says (with the great Spinoza and many Hindu theologians) that God and the Universe are one and the same. But, said Kneeland, talking to that God was no better than talking to the plants of the earth, as in Wislawa Szymborska's great poem. We may talk, but the plants do not listen. We can only hear the sound of our own voices floating in the air over their silent, speechless leaves.

Abner Kneeland's testimony made him an atheist, as far as everyone else was concerned. And in those days, there was nothing worse than an atheist, for atheists blasphemed God.

Now many of the Universalists were simply furious that Kneeland went so far, and so publicly. It was the public nature of his ministry that actually caused the problems. Kneeland's rantings, you see, seemed to verify the criticism leveled against Universalism by so many Methodists and other Protestant Christians…"If you foolish Universalists throw out Hell and the divinity of Jesus, the only thing left to throw out is God. You Universalists are the paving stones of the road that leads to atheism, anarchy and blasphemy."

Many Universalists fought this notion. They were embarrassed by Kneeland. They thought of themselves as being far more like their religious neighbors than not. The Unitarians too claimed respectability, not blasphemy, as their religion.

Thus, Abner Kneeland made both religious communities very nervous. They could see very clearly that his ill-tempered speech was drilling a big hole in the boat of their respectability. "See?" they could hear their neighbors saying, "See? We told you so! Your religion is flabby and weak, it has no blood and guts, no threat of hell to keep you all in line. When people enter in your church door, they come out of it as mere infidels."

And so they had to have a trial, based on the civil law that blasphemy was a crime. Kneeland, the Universalist divine, was convicted of blasphemy. The poor man appealed three times. But eventually, he had to serve time in jail.

When he got out, he left the Eastern seaboard and went West to Iowa, where, based on models suggested by Mr. Owen, he founded a utopian community named Salubria. Salubria didn't last very long, unfortunately, and by 1844, Kneeland had died, and Salubria just couldn't go on very well without him. All in all, it's a fascinating story from our shared history. One of the most amazing, I'd say.

Now the first reading reminded us that the very definition of blasphemy is in many ways up for grabs. It always seems to depend on the amount of rigidity in the religious tenets, the will of the majority, the sensitivities of the majority and minority, and, more often than not, the politics. Or sometimes, even the personality of the people is involved in this business. For example, the famous reformer, Martin Luther, had a rather tempestuous personality and it shows in his use of the word "blasphemy"…absolutely anything and everything he did not personally like, he considered "blasphemous." It was one of his favorite words.

But thirteen hundred years earlier, the Romans sent Luther's early (and far more radical predecessors) to the arena to die. You see, the Romans were totally convinced that the Christians were blasphemers and deserved death. As they carted them off into the arenas, the citizenry cried out over and over,"Away with those atheists!"

Now clearly, you may agree, it makes little sense to call any Christians atheists…. today. But long ago, the Roman majority claimed that Roman civil religion was the only Way, Truth and Light. They claimed that Caesar was the only divine authority. So they could not have a bunch of upstarts going around claiming that they believed in a God no one could see or touch, the exact opposite of Jupiter and Hera. And, they couldn't have citizens going around saying that a Jewish peasant mason named Jesus had more authority than Caesar. Thus, the Roman government, founded on the universality of slavery and efficiency of their military draft, certainly thought it blasphemous for young male Christians to refuse to be drafted into the Roman Army by denying the authority of the very religion sustained by military conquest. And, they were morally offended that mere slaves worshipped with free people in Christian homes, and women worshipped with the men. All these radical social theories made the Christians atheists and blasphemers of God, as far as the respectable Roman populace and government was concerned.

And thus, unlike our lucky pacifist bull Ferdinand from the story this morning, most Roman governors did not send them home to smell the flowers, but sent them to their graves with flowers on them. In fact, a number of the early Christians were simply killed just for smelling the flowers of the gospel in the first place. They never even left home.

Thus, I think you can see that who an atheist - or blasphemer, is depends entirely on your point of view. I've always said that the words atheist, agnostic and theist are entirely relative anyway, and make no sense except in reference to each other. But, more importantly, you can see how the political and social connotations are even more important factors than the religious ones in all of this.

This relative inability to define "blasphemy" had me wondering this week. "If Pantheists like Kneeland suddenly became the majority, is it possible they might think that the poet Wislawa Szymborska is making fun of their belief that Nature and God are the same thing? After all, I could read her poem as poking fun at the idea that God is everything…even the plants, "heather, mistletoe and forget-me-not." People speak to their plants and only hear the sound of their own voices. I could interpret the poem as a blasphemy against Pantheism.

But surely Szymborska was not writing with the intention to insult or destroy any religious viewpoint…she was making only what I call a rather "small h" humanistic point.

But then, that's the issue, isn't it? I do not know of one of the hundreds of thousands of people killed for blasphemy in history who ever thought he or she was committing a crime or an outrage either. These "blasphemers" were simply being faithful to themselves, and to the "flowers" they could smell. The majority around them took it in the worst possible way, and decided they were guilty. Then they killed them. And as our brilliant ancestor, the great Sebastian Castellio, said, when the Protestant leader Jehan Cauvin -John Calvin- had our blasphemous ancestor Miguel Servet burned at the stake, "When you kill someone for their beliefs, you are hardly converting them to your own beliefs; you are simply killing a human being." I agree. No truer words were ever written.

Now since I know what I believe, and since I know what a great many of you believe, here in this room, because you have shared that with me, I have to offer thanks that you and I live in this era and not 350 years ago. I cannot think of one of us in this room who, had we ever opened our mouths a few centuries ago, wouldn't be either in a dungeon or tied to a stake.

I would like to suggest that the political and social are almost always more important than the theological in most cases of so-called blasphemy.

For example, in the case of Kneeland, Pantheism as a theological position hardly seems threatening to the social order. But you see, Kneeland didn't just stick to theology. He had social opinions. Here's one of them, written Aug. 12, 1831.

"The basic principle of society should be the principle of perfect equality as to rights and privileges, totally regardless of sex; and I will go one step further and say, totally regardless of color. What? To marry each other? Yes, to love and marry if they fancy each other."

Here is a statement that will raise some eyebrows yet in these States of ours, I suspect. And I believe that fear over the radical nature of these radical social principles was at least partially to blame for many of the Universalists and many Unitarians ganging up on Abner Kneeland in 1831…they were, after all, just what they thought they were… "respectable people." And Kneeland's social program was unrespectable, way far ahead of anyone else's program for reform in the early last century, Unitarians and Universalists included. We have grown a great deal in the last 170 years, I think you'll admit.

Now all this thinking about blasphemy from an odd, but convincingly researched, book has made me pause to ask a few questions of myself, and of you. For unlike Szymborska's plants, I do pose questions.

How much are my religious values today tied to my respectability? Tied to my class values? How about yours?

Is there anything about my religious views that could be seen as threatening to the social order status quo? Is that a good thing? An embarrassing thing? Or an uncomfortable thing? Should I be proud that this is so, or cautious and reluctant to own it?

This question unfolds rather large in my consciousness. You see, people tell me they are quiet about their Unitarian Universalist religious views in the workplace when folks around them are having Bible studies and passing out conversion tracts. But I wonder, now that we are past the age of dungeons and stakes, now that the laws for blasphemy are mostly repealed and no one under law can threaten life or limb, what is life-threatening about saying who we are clearly? Why can't I say when confronted with a person who does not respect or honor my religion, "Look, I live a religious way that is important to me, and is central to my life. I am not interested in being told that God doesn't like me because I do not go to your church, or that I am not really religious because I do not accept your particular faith. You do not accept mine either, and I am not trying to convert you. I do not think the Bible is the word of God. I think it is a human book about many things, good and bad, and I find a deep religious peace in this assertion. If you need to believe I will burn in hell forever, fine. But please cease and desist from trying to convert me to your way of being in the world. Thank you very much."

I mean it. When we let the majority define for us what "Religion" is, and they brand us as irreligious because we believe and do as we do,

we give away all of our power and authority to others. If you say you are no longer religious because you are no longer a Baptist or Nazarene, you have given to Baptists and Nazarenes the whole authority to define who you are and what religion is for everyone else in the world. This is a very serious mistake, with terrible consequences. We define what our religion is for us, not anyone else.

Another question the issue of blasphemy raises:

What is of deepest value for you? I have been thinking about that question all week. What action would you think is blasphemous or sacrilegious? Anything? Is nothing worth more or less than anything else? I find meditating on Simone Weil's ideas as found at the top of your Order of Celebration to be helpful in thinking about this.

In the end, I have to say I find Mr. Serrano's piece of art to be not blasphemous, but only in bad taste. For any modern artist in this multi-cultural nation to imagine that creating a piece of art that takes the symbol of a religious tradition and associates it with human excrement would not cause outrage is hopelessly naïve. It's, quite simply, bad art, since a good artist knows his public and tries to communicate with them. But his work is not blasphemy to me. I don't think that Serrano needs to be punished, by the law, jailed or, by God, thrown to the lions. I think respectful criticism of his work is in order, however.

Respect is basic for me. Look, I am more than willing to be strongly critical of theological positions. I think such things need to be done at the right time and place to be sure. And I am talking about a lot more than calling the Trinity into question or the divinity of Jesus. I call into question many more things: the Protestant doctrine of the blood atonement of Christ, or the decision of some Muslim clerics to sentence Salmon Rushdie to death because they interpreted his book as blasphemy on hearsay alone; and I criticize the intent of some Orthodox Israeli Jewish rabbis to rebuild the ancient temple and return to the practice of animal sacrifice. I am fiercely critical of all these things. But this does not mean I hate Christians, Muslims or Jews, or blaspheme and disrespect their richly varied religious traditions. And this is because they have, as Abner Kneeland said 170 years ago, the same right and privilege as I do…to be critical of my theological positions. I still have things to learn after all. I am not a finished being, and I hope to God you are not finished beings either. Being carefully critical is not being disrespectful. And, I am also willing to defend my own religious positions when criticized, and even to change my mind if you offer me con-vincing evidence. (And it had better be good!)

As I said, Serrano's form of ridicule strikes me as naïve and disrespectful. And any criticism that stoops only to ridicule, or begins and ends there, any criticism which refuses to hear the other side and ask questions about it, is simply reactionary, and therefore, without much intellectual or spiritual value, as far as I am concerned.

Oh sure, there are times when I want to be as passionate as Luther, and call many things blasphemy just to get the ferocity out of my system…for instance, when I read that the Columbus School Board is even considering teaching Creationism in our science classrooms,

I want to shout "Blasphemy" all over the place.

But basically, I think you can tell that this antique word blasphemy opens a much bigger book of questions about value, the sacred, and respect than even Leonard Levy could write. So I will leave that book open, massive as it is. I hope that you might take it with you, and marvel at our blasphemous history, engage in sifting the most worthy and sacred from the dross of respectable culture, and find what signs of your religious life you are not ashamed or unhappy to proclaim in life, word and deed.

Sutta of a Hundred Words [back to top]
(Like a Jewish scroll or a Christian gospel of a Muslim sura, a sutta - or sutra - is a portion of Buddhist scripture)

Thus I have heard.
Siddartha the Buddha
was walking the streets of Columbus
one day, when he saw a woman begging.
She wasn't part of his Order.
"Do you want to beg?" he asked.
"No," she said, "I'm alone.
I fall through the cracks,
they say downtown,
shaking their heads. The State's
cut funds again. Thus, I beg."
Siddartha said "Life is suffering, yes,
but most suffering
doesn't blaspheme the sacred.
Allowing yours, does."
Then he said "Come,
join my circle,
that by our free faith
in our ability to undo blasphemies,
we might thrive together.
"Someday," said the woman, rising
"may the faith you live
be lived by many, not a few."

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