Hilton Head Island, SC – July 14, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
John 14:1-14
A Sermon by John M. Miller
The word “dogma” is used loosely in a great many contexts. For example, some fans of the Miami Heat might say, “It is a dogma that LeBron James is not only the greatest currently active basketball player, but he is the greatest player ever to stuff a round ball through a ten-foot-high hoop.” Republicans who are wedded to the philosophy of Grover Norquist say, “It is a dogma that total government spending must never increase, nor can taxes ever be raised.” Democrats might declare, “It is a dogma that whatever Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell favor, respectable Democrats must oppose.” Certain Cubs fans, but by now surely not all of them, might say, “It is a dogma that someday the Chicago Cubs shall win the World Series.” Back in the day there were many who proclaimed, “It is a dogma that a Kaiser – or a Fraser or a Tucker or a Hupmobile or a Desoto – is the best car on the road.” Such dogmas are highly dubious.
People might speak dogmatically about those purported dogmas, but dogmas they are not. Technically, a dogma is defined as “that which must be believed.” No one is required to believe that LeBron is the greatest or that taxes must never be raised or whatever else might be termed a dogma. Dogma technically has to do with religious belief, and only religious belief. There are no other dogmas about anything, despite the fact that we often use the term incorrectly. Speaking with the purest of objectivity, it is true that no one, including Michael Jordan, has ever been as good as LeBron, but you are not required to believe it. You can be wrong about that, and it’s OK.
But if a dogma is something which must be believed, what if you don’t believe it? And what is the difference between a dogma and a mere belief? There is an enormous spectrum regarding that issue in Christianity and every other religion. Some branches of religion are much more dogmatic than others. Some revel in dogma, while others are completely opposed to it. Many Roman Catholics, Wisconsin and Missouri Synod Lutherans, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many evangelical denominations are quite dogmatic. Orthodox Jews are often very dogmatic, but Reform Jews are not. Shiite Muslims are dogmatic, but Sunnis are not, at least for the most part.
Among Christians, Mainline Protestants, such as United Methodists, most Episcopalians (except currently many in the USA), Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, the Disciples of Christ, and the United Church of Christ are not very dogmatic, and by now probably can be said to have no dogmas at all. Hardshell Baptists, Seventh Day Baptists, Conservative Baptists, and many Southern Baptists strongly believe in dogmas, but other Southern Baptists, American Baptists, and Cooperative Fellowship Baptists abhor dogmas. Unitarians are to dogmas what health food lovers are to junk food or Big Macs: they avoid them like the plague.
The Catholic Church is by far the largest branch of Christendom, and it also has the most readily recognized set of dogmas. For example, if you want to be a proper Catholic, you must believe in the immaculate conception of Mary, that the Pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals, that the Roman Catholic Church is the One True Church, that you cannot practice any method of birth control except the rhythm method, etc., etc., etc. Some of you were raised Catholic, and either you have put all that behind you and you are now living guilt-free, or it still gnaws on you that there are things you know you must believe which you don’t believe. Dogmas are very persuasive and influential. If you’re told often enough what you must believe, you may end up actually believing it. That’s why dogmas are formulated in the first place. And if eventually you don’t believe them, you may find yourself in a continuous moral quandary, because you cannot believe what you have been told you must believe.
In the early 1960s a fairly elderly Italian cardinal by the name of Angelo Roncalli was elected Pope. It was widely assumed he would be a kind of caretaker Pope for a few years. As it turned out, he only reigned for five and a half years, but he most certainly was no mere caretaker. He began the process for a major reform of Catholicism. Cardinal Roncalli took the papal name of John XXIII. (John XXII was such a disgrace that no pope used the name “John” for many centuries after the papacy of John22 ended in disgrace.)
Shortly after becoming Pope, John XXIII issued a call for the Second Vatican Council. Vatican I had been the last ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, and it was held a full century earlier. Vatican II revolutionized Roman Catholicism, at least for a time. John XXIII did not live to see his council through to its hastened termination, but he started the process by which many previous dogmas were called into question, and many new ideas were given birth as beliefs, and not as hard and fast dogmas.
Last February Pope Benedict XVI resigned. He was the first Pope in centuries to do so. He was replaced by a fairly elderly, relatively obscure archbishop, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina. As a result of the early signals in this papacy, it is possible Francis I could be another John XXIII. If so, Catholic dogmas will diminish, and beliefs will burgeon. We shall see. As in everything else, we live in hope. May Francis I become another pivotal pope in the most pivotal of all Christian Churches. It is very encouraging that he is moving to have John XXIII declared a saint within 2013. As for John Paul II, well…..
At this point I want clearly to alert you to the fact that nothing I am saying here is dogma. None of it is anything that must be believed. Further, in The Chapel Without Walls, we deliberately have no dogmas, nor do we even have a set list of beliefs. Because we don’t, you can be dogmatic if you want, but I – and I presume most of us – strongly advise against it. Dogma can be anathema to religion, while belief is the fertile ground out of which the best religion religion grows and thrives.
Viktor Frankl was one of the intellectual giants of the 20th century. The famous Holocaust survivor of the Nazi death camps wrote the following: “The more weakly one stands on the ground of his belief the more he clings with both hands to the dogma that separates it from other beliefs….The more firmly one stands on the grounds of his faith the more he has both hands free to reach out to those of his fellow men who cannot share his belief. The first attitude entails fanaticism; the second, tolerance. Tolerance does not mean that one accepts the belief of another; but it does mean that one respects him as a human being, with the right and freedom of choosing his own way of believing and living.”
Dr. Frankl’s observations might lead us to conclude this: Believe strongly, and avoid dogmas altogether. But realize that some others with strong beliefs are certain to believe differently than we do. That is not only inevitable, it is also perfectly acceptable. We need not all believe the same things, nor shall we do so - - - ever. Therefore all people of all kinds of faith need to support one another in their faith pilgrimages. To believe with conviction is hard enough; it is a tragedy when people with different beliefs beat one another over the head with their beliefs.
In the growing opinion of a lifetime, I have come to think that the person who wrote the Gospel of John clearly intended to turn Jesus into a dedicated disciple of dogmatism. The Jesus we encounter in the Fourth Gospel is not at all like the one we find in the first three Synoptic Gospels. That is why I rarely preach from John. It is John who has Jesus say things like these: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” “Before Abraham was, I am.” “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” “I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Then there is the astonishing sermon text for today, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.”
The Jesus of the Synoptics focuses on God; the Jesus of John focuses on Jesus. In the first three Gospels, God is the be-all, end-all of our faith; in John Jesus is the be-all, end-all. The Synoptics encourage beliefs; John encourages dogmas. The older I get, the more suspicious of dogmas, any dogmas, all dogmas, I become. The purpose of beliefs is to nourish faith. The purpose of dogmas is to nourish certainty, and even certitude. But none of us can be absolutely certain about what we believe. We can only hold our beliefs on the basis of careful and cautious analysis, never insisting that we, and we alone, hold all truth safely in the capsule of our cranium.
Exactly fifty years ago, the Anglican Bishop of Woolich, John A.T. Robinson, published a short paperback book called Honest to God. SCM Press, a British publisher of religious books, printed 6000 copies, 2000 of which were sent to a Presbyterian publisher in the USA. Nobody, least of all Bishop Robinson, thought the book would set the world on fire. But within four years it had sold over a million copies, and had been translated into seventeen languages. For a religious book, a million copies is the equivalent of ten or twenty million copies of a novel.
Honest to God came out when I was in my last year of seminary. It created a huge stir on campus. It called into question many things which then were thought to be sacrosanct. At the time, I agreed with not very much of what John Robinson wrote, although over time I have come to affirm many of the claims he made. In his later book The Roots of a Radical, Bishop Robinson argued that integrity should take priority over orthodoxy, love over law, persons over principle, and justice over order. Obviously more than just that must be said, but at least those brief statements should be said. In any case, the self-professed radical struck a strong blow against entrenched orthodoxy and dogma in favor of a more open approach to what we imagine is the essence of the Christian religion.
In a book of prayers, an unidentified monk of the Eastern Orthodox family of Christianity wrote the following prayer:
“Lord of love, moment by moment I encounter men and women whom I do not know, but whose generosity and simple nobility are plain to see.
Perhaps they are not believers. Perhaps they do not know what I know. But inwardly I say to them, ‘Receive a blessing. You have done me so much good, I would love to do you a little good in return.’ The good these people have done, without being aware of it, would I be able to do as well?
But how do I dream of igniting such fires, when all I have in my hands is poor wood which is damp and green, and spent tapers? I who am so reluctant to do good in ordinary, everyday things, how is it possible I should do great and extraordinary deeds?
‘My child,’ you say to me, Lord, ‘what matters is not the little you hold in your hands. It is to join that little to the fire which is in my heart. There your tapers will be restored and your wood made dry. You think that you dare risk almost nothing, but this almost nothing, if you really try, can become something extraordinary. I do not say something spectacular. Concentrate on the more ordinary things, the weaker ones. Do ordinary things in an extraordinary way. I mean, with extraordinary love. Then the kindling will light. Then the fire will take hold, will take hold of you. Then you yourself will begin to be a carrier of fire.’”
Dogma is deadly; belief is life-giving and life-affirming. A small spark of faith can light a great fire. We should not ask ourselves, “Do I believe the correct things, the proper things?” Rather we should ask, “What good might I do with what I do believe?”
The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel displays almost no uncertainty about anything. He always seems to know what should be believed, and believed with dogmatic conviction. For some of us, such a Messiah is hard to follow, because we ourselves are often mired in uncertainty. If we believed what the Fourth-Gospel Messiah believed, life might seem much more direct and uncomplicated, but we don’t, and it isn’t.
On the cover of today’s bulletin is a quote from William Davies Shipley, about whom I know nothing at all. He said, “I am not afraid of those tender and scrupulous consciences who are ever cautious about professing and believing too much; if they are sincerely wrong, I forgive their errors and respect their integrity. – The men I am afraid of are those who believe everything, subscribe to everything, and vote for everything.”
From his name Philippe Vernier was, I presume, a Frenchman, but of that I am not certain, and I know nothing else about him either. Whoever he was, and wherever he was from, he wrote, “Do not wait for great strength before setting out, for immobility will weaken you further. Do not wait to see clearly before starting: One has to walk toward the light. When you take that first step, accomplish that tiny little act, the necessity of which may only be apparent to you, you will be astonished to feel that the effort, rather than exhausting your strength, has doubled it --- and that you already see more clearly what you have to do next.”
It takes far more courage to go forward in belief than to go forward in dogma. Dogmas give us no freedom of movement, and tell us there is only one way to go. Beliefs give us an infinite number of options, but they also require us to exercise our best judgment over how to proceed with our lives. Dogmas separate humans; beliefs unite them. Dogma insists on its own way; belief affirms many ways.
The Jesus who is Jesus invites us into his opened-armed community of faith. The God who is God sent that Jesus into the world. Believe, and receive the Gospel.