2019.10.20 Saying No to Sacrificial Suffering

Saying No to Sacrificial Suffering

October 20, 2019        Rev. Laura Bogle                     Foothills UU Fellowship

Wisdom Story:  The Giving Tree retold (adapted from Victoria Weinstein, with apologies to Shel Silverstein)

Reading

“I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way of life. …I could see that when theology presents Jesus' death as God's sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.

But what if this is not true? What if nothing, or very little, is saved? What if the consequence of sacrifice is simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement, shame? What if the severing of life is merely destructive of life and is not the path of love, courage, trust, and faith? What if the performance of sacrifice is a ritual in which some human beings bear loss and others are protected from accountability or moral expectations?”
― Rebecca Ann Parker

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Those words we just heard from Rebecca Parker come from her book Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Rebecca co-wrote that book with Rita Nakashima Brock; both ordained clergy women.  Rebecca was ordained in the United Methodist Church and she served as President of our UU seminary in California, Starr King School for the Ministry, for 25 years.

I’m telling you this because I want you to know that I’m drawing much of my thinking from her and Rita’s work, which over the years has opened up really important theological questions for all of us who claim Unitarian Universalism as a spiritual home. 

Today I’m going to talk about a couple of different understandings of sacrifice present in the Christian tradition and basically what’s problematic about them!  Next week, I’m going to flip and ask us to consider the power of life-giving sacrifice--  Is that even possible?

Two assumptions:

1) Regardless of how Christianity may have had a presence or not in our own personal spiritual journeys – we all must deal with some level of its spiritual baggage because dominant Christian thinking is interwoven with so much of mainstream culture in the United States.

2)Theology – the way we think and talk about God—functions in this world; it impacts people’s real lives; it can be life-giving and it can be abusive.  As people of faith we have a responsibility to examine the explicit and the implicit theological messages in our words and actions.

Rebecca begins her part of the book with stories of women – women who suffered in situations of domestic abuse, and whose abuse was, if not outright condoned, was implicitly sanctioned and tolerated by religious messages about self-sacrifice.

She writes about one woman: “In the church she went to, the intact family was celebrated as God’s will; father, mother, and children were meant to be together…. [She] believed that because this configuration of family was the will of God, God would somehow make it all right.  For her to break up the family would make her a bad person.  Doing the will of God was more important than her personal safety.  The possibility that faithfulness to God’s will might mean pain and violence could even have been in its favor.  A good woman would be willing to accept personal pain, and think only of the good of the family.  You know, ‘Your life is only valuable if you give it away’ and ‘This is your cross to bear.’ 

She heard… that Jesus didn’t turn away from the cup of suffering when God asked him to drink it.  She was trying to be a good Christian, to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.”

Rebecca herself had grown up in a liberal Christian household with a father and grandfather who were ministers who centered on following Jesus’ life and message of Love as the way to salvation, not his death.  But, even for her, she says, ‘The gesture of sacrifice was familiar.  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, and shame is avoided….Why did I know so well how to do it?  Why did the women I knew as friends, counseled as parishioners, preached to in my congregation, know so well how to do it?”

I recently had a conversation that I get to have a version of pretty regularly as a Unitarian Universalist minister, though each time feels like a privilege, and each conversation is its own unique story. The conversation concerned leaving the religious tradition in which the person had grown up – because it just required too much sacrifice.  Sacrifice of the person’s truth, their true self, even their well-being.  In order to stay in relationship, and avoid shame, the person had to cut off a part of themselves. Eventually they decided to say No.

Many people come through our doors because they just can’t get with the theology of substitutionary atonement—they say ‘no’ to the theology that says God sacrificed his son to redeem the sins of a disobedient humanity in an act of horrific violence.  This theology functions in the world, says that redemption comes through violent sacrifice, suffering and abuse, cutting something off in order to restore right relationship and balance.

The consequences of this kind of theology has especially functioned in the world to increase the suffering of those without social power – women, children, indigenous people, black people, LGBTQ folks, and others.   Theologies and cultural messages that celebrate particular kinds of sacrifice often ignore power dynamics—who is sacrificing for whom?  Who has choice or agency in that sacrifice?  Who has the privilege to opt out? 

When women are told it’s their cross to bear to put up with an abusive husband, who is served?  What kind of God is served?

When LGBTQ folks are told they must excise a core part of their very being in order to stay in relationship with family or church, who is served?  What kind of God is served?

It is perhaps easy for many of us to sit here and say “Well, I rejected that kind of God a long time ago.” Or, “That’s why I don’t believe in God, period.”   Or, “That’s why I’m a Unitarian Universalist!”

It is clear to me, and to most of you too, that this sacrificial atonement theology leads to spiritual abuse if not outright physical abuse.  It is one of the reasons why just the word “Sacrifice” makes many of us uncomfortable.

But I think very often we still carry its messages embedded within us, often unconsciously.  That our worth some how comes from our ability to bear a cross gracefully without asking for help; that it is virtuous to make it through times of suffering without saying “Hey!  This suffering needs to stop!” 

This morning I ask you in the coming week to examine yourself and your own religious history.  Especially if you grew up in a religious tradition that centered sacrificial atonement theology, are you still carrying around some of its messages?  How might we work together to heal those?

As Rebecca Parker says: “Theology that defines virtue as obedience to God suppresses the virtue of revolt.”

I want to be clear here – substitionary sacrificial atonement is not the only way to understand the Christian message – it just happens to be the primary theological viewpoint of Christians in this part of the world.

We Unitarian Universalists are testament to the fact that sacrificial suffering isn't the only way to understand the Christian message; sacrificial suffering is not the only way to salvation.   

Way back in 1805,  Universalist minister and theologian Hosea Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement.  Here’s one of my favorite passages:  “The belief that the great Jehovah was offended with his creatures to that degree, that nothing but the death of Christ, or the endless misery of mankind, could appease his anger, is an idea that has done more injury to the Christian religion than the writings of all its opposers, for many centuries.  The error has been fatal to the life and spirit of the religion of Christ in our world; all those principles which are to be dreaded by men have been believed to exist in God;  and professors have been moulded into the image of their Deity, and become more cruel….”

Ballou is basically saying that believing in a God that actually caused the death of Jesus gives creedence to violence.  As Rebecca Parker says, “If God is imagined as a fatherly torturer, earthly parents are also justified, perhaps even required, to teach through violence.  Children are instructed to understand their submission to pain as a form of love.”

In her book Rebecca Parker takes us through 6 different ways of understanding Jesus’ death as redemptive – and she questions all of them!  I’m not going through all 6 today, but there is one more that I want to delve into this morning.

We, along with other liberal Protestants, in the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, expressed through the Social Gospel movement a focus on self-sacrificing love as an alternative path to salvation.  We are not saved by God sacrificing his obedient son, but by following the example of Jesus’ life and willingness to give up his life.  In this theological perspective the central sin isn’t disobedience, it’s selfishness.

Rebecca Parker writes, “The importance of Jesus for liberal Christians is not that he paid the price for sin.  Jesus is important because he embodied loving concern for others and called people to love their neighbors.  Jesus confronted the oppressive ruler of his day and was not afraid to risk his life doing so.  No greater love has any human being than the love that sacrifices self to help and defend others.”

Whether you consider yourself a Christian or not, how many of us would say that’s the message embedded within us?  That selfishness is a kind of sin, and that it is virtuous to sacrifice self to help and defend others?

This is definitely the kind of theology I grew up with.  Heck, this is the theology that I sometimes preach.

Well, I am more and more uncomfortable with it on its own because of how I see it functioning in the world when we don’t take into account power dynamics.  Too often it is again the people with less social power who are the ones doing the self-sacrificing.  Rebecca Parker asks us to consider that for some people perhaps the central sin isn’t selfishness.  “It may be just the opposite: a lack of a sense of self.”

For instance, she says “Women are culturally conditioned to care for others, but not ourselves.  We believe that having needs, feelings, ambitions, or thoughts of our own is not good.  In this self-abnegation, we enact a culturally prescribed role that perpetuates sexist social structures.”

This kind of self-giving is too often a one-way street in our social and political relations.  Like the story of The Giving Tree, some people are expected to just give and give and give until nothing is left – and others, like the boy in the story, get what they want and need.

This is frankly the bedrock of our capitalist system – that some give all they have, their labor and their lives, to enrich others.

This, I believe, is also at the root of our climate catastrophe.  That we have expected the generosity of the earth to be never-ending.  The earth, by the way, very often called Mother Earth.

This kind of self-giving still exists within a context of domination and submission.  Those without power give and those with power get.

If we return to the Christian story for a moment, while some Social Gospel thinkers would say that Jesus voluntary giving himself up even unto death overcomes the sin of selfishness, it does not end the problem of domination and submission.  Parker writes, “An oppressive system killed him to silence him and to threaten others who might follow him.”

So, where does this leave us?  How do we know when to say ‘no’ to self-sacrifice? 

We may be able to clearly identify situations of outright abuse, and our religious heritage calls us to speak out and resist, to revolt.  But what about the ways these theological messages embed themselves in us and in our systems in more subtle and insidious ways?  Who are we expecting to overcome the sin of selfishness?  Who gets held to account for that?

Here’s a question to consider, if every woman in our community stopped giving away ourselves and our labor for the good of our community, where would we be?  You might ask the same question about immigrant laborers.  Or imagine if the earth one day was able to just stop giving to us.  To say ‘No.’  I have given too much and I am suffering because of it.

Our interdependence with all of life means we can’t escape that our lives are actually upheld by the labor of others as well as the lives of plants and animals and the energy of the sun and earth.  Our Unitarian Universalist values ask us to be mindful of what we are sacrificing and what we are assuming others will sacrifice. 

This requires really deep and sustained ethical and spiritual discernment.  It requires us to really examine what internal and external messages we live with about sacrifice – who should sacrifice, and for what reason, and for whose benefit?  It requires us to reflect on our own social locations, and the places we hold power and privilege, as well as the places we don’t.  I hope you’ll keep thinking on this in the week ahead. 

And next week join me as we ask together How do we build truly reciprocal ways of being that upend the social structures of domination and that give room for people to give to one another freely and with joy?

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I know that part of the answer is to simply be asking the questions, together.

I am grateful to be on that quest with you.  I believe that together we can find the path of love, courage, trust and faith.  May it be so.