Liturgies

What I want to share with you today is a little about the Politics of Religion.

A priest was being honoured at his retirement dinner after 25 years in the parish. A leading local politician and member of the congregation was chosen to make the presentation and give a little speech at the dinner.

He was delayed so the priest decided to say his own few words while they waited. “I got my first impression of the parish from the first confession I heard here. I thought I had been assigned to a terrible place. The very first person who entered my confessional told me he had stolen a television set and, when stopped by the police, had almost murdered the officer.

He had stolen money from his parents, embezzled from his place of business, had an affair with his boss’s wife, taken illegal drugs and gave VD to his sister. I was appalled. But as the days went on I knew that my people were not all like that and I had, indeed, come to a fine parish full of good and loving people.”

Just as the priest finished his talk, the politician arrived full of apologies at being late. He immediately began to make the presentation and give his talk. “I’ll never forget the first day our parish priest arrived,” said the politician. “In fact, I had the honour of being the first one to go to confession.”

Recently I have been reading “THE FAITH INSTINCT. How religion endured and why it endures” by Nicholas Wade, former editor and science reporter for the New York Times. In it he explores how religion has developed over the past 50000 years through the eyes of evolutionary psychology, genetics, anthropology, biology, social science and religious history, he traces how religion grew to be so essential to early societies in their struggle for survival and how it provided the impetus for law and government. Religion it seems evolved to bind people together for a common purpose, frequently for morality and defence.

In the best forms it would touch all the senses and lift the mind. It would transcend the self. It would find a way to be equally true to emotion and to reason, to our need to belong to one another and to what has been learned of the human condition through rational inquiry.

In order for religion to meet the criterion it had to adapt and change to coincide with changing conditions and the cultural milieu. No greater change had to be negotiated than that from hunter-gatherer communities to the more settled agricultural and far more structured communities. In hunter-gatherer communities the structures for government were on the whole far more egalitarian. (people regarding each other as equals).

But this became more and more difficult to maintain once people settled down and started living in communities larger than the usual hunter-gatherer band. The hierarchical side of human nature asserted itself and powerful men established chiefdoms and kingdoms. People began for the first time to acquire property and status, no longer restricted to owning no more than they could carry; people were able to generate surpluses of crops and of goods.

Gone were the days when all men were hunters and all women gatherers. These more complex settled societies required a specialization of labour. Managers were needed to store and distribute the surpluses, or trade them with neighbouring groups. Gradations of wealth emerged. The new societies became hierarchical, with leaders and led. The dilemma emerged in settled communities – how were the new leaders to establish their legitimacy and persuade those they ruled to abandon the age-old principles of egalitarianism? (of everyone being equal)

A central element of the solution was to co-opt religion, the time-honoured source of authority and cohesion in hunter-gatherer societies. Priesthoods were instituted, and these sacerdotal officials began to control rituals and to separate people from direct communication with their gods. In hunter-gatherer communities their rituals were full of active conscious participation of everyone present. Dance was a central element and often everyone danced. We witness this in aboriginal corroborees. Some of us experienced some wonderful dancing at the NAIDOC family day at Musgrave Park.

In African cultures, if you danced it was a sign that the Spirit was within, and in you. Dance created a source of exhilaration and a feeling of solidarity with the other participants and as one dancer described “Dance created a sense of well-being, of personal enlargement, a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life.”

As Agricultural-Settled communities developed, the use of dance in religious ceremonies diminished. The need to control and maintain order became paramount. Dance empowered individuals to listen to their own connection to the scared. This was considered dangerous in settled communities and hence we see its disappearance from religious ceremony.

Those who could connect with God and the sacred became fewer and fewer. God became the domain of the priestly class, and connection to God became primarily and only through the priestly class. They became the” suppositories” (to use Tony Abbott’s words) of all spiritual truth and connection to the divine.

These repositories of truth were often written down and became sacred texts, special knowledge to be interpreted by the few, which the Bible became for Christians for the majority of history.

It would seem that many of the New Testament writings had their genius in inviting people onto a journey of transformation, especially the 7 genuine letters of St Paul. The transformation that comes from dying to the self and putting on the mind of Christ (universal consciousness) – it is no longer I who live, but Christ now lives in me.

But somewhere all these writings became literalized after being written in metaphor. As John Dominic Crossan (Irish Biblical Scholar) says “It was not that these ancient writers were writing literally and we were smart enough to interpret them metaphysically, NO they were writing metaphorically and we were dumb enough to interpret them literally.”

We ask why they were interpreted literally, and when we investigate we discover that it is for the same reason dance was suppressed in Hunter and Gatherer cultures. It gave power to the few. In Christianity the priestly class who they claim apostolic succession to a Jesus who they literally make the Son of God.

Belonging to this religion was no longer about the transformation St Paul spoke of but simply assenting to a set of beliefs prescribed in the Nicene Creed. Basically there is One God, and one way to God through Jesus who was God through the one church.

If you stayed faithful to all the beliefs ascribed by this one church you could be guaranteed a place in heaven with this one God. The religion was enforced and within a few centuries became entrenched in the Roman Empire. Constantine chose a form of Christianity, a literal Christianity which he could control through the few men who were in control. It was controlled and controlling perfect for an empire in need of unity through uniformity.

And if you had any doubt that Roman Catholicism had changed in recent times you only have to go to last week when Pope Francis formally recognized the International Association of Exorcists, a group of 250 priests spread over 30 countries who supposedly cast out demons. The devil is alive and well literally in the Pope’s mind who mentions The Devil a number of times in his first mass as Pope. On Jesus he says “When one does not profess Jesus Christ, one professes the worldliness of the Devil."

Also, have a read of Bishop Bill Morris’s book “Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three”, in his dealings with a literalist fundamentalist Vatican Curia controlling to the nth degree. But when we read today’s Gospel we realize it was not the intention of these early writers to have their writings interpreted literally. For Matthew it was a Jesus who told them many things in parables, in metaphors.

Just as Matthew himself is doing in today's Gospel and if you see behind the metaphor to the invitation to be transformed then happy are your eyes because you see, your ears because they hear. Many prophets,writes St Matthew, longed to see what you see and never saw it, to hear what you hear and never heard it. You therefore who are able to properly hear the parable of the Sower as a metaphor for your lives, you are the ones who  can truly hear the word and in living it out  will yield a rich harvest in living its message – for you are the ones who will find your  lives,and in the words of Jesus,live life in all its fullness.