“Two Kinds of Religion”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
January 6, 2008

            There’s so much talk about religion and public life these days, especially in the presidential election.

            I’d venture to say that there’s never been so much talk of faith and values in any election in living memory.

            And it’s not only the nuke-an-atheist-communist-gay-baby-seal-in-the-name-of-Jesus kind of religious talk that has spewed forth from the so-called Religious Right in recent decades. As Time Magazine recently said, there’s been a “leveling of the praying field,” with Democrats evoking the language of faith as often as Republicans.  Democrats have come a long way since Howard Dean said in 2004 that his favorite book in the New Testament was the Book of Job.

            For better or for worse, it seems that once again religion will play a significant role in the 2008 presidential election.

            Something that has always amazed me is how so many people in this country who call themselves religious can have such different views about things. I suspect many of us wonder about this, so this morning, what I’d like to offer for your consideration, is one way of making sense of how so many people in this country who call themselves religious can have such different understandings about what it means to be religious.

            It’s always dangerous to make generalizations, especially gross generalizations, but I’m going to make one. There are only two kinds of religion in this country, and most people practice either one kind of religion or the other.

            When I talk about there being two kinds of religion in this country, I’m not talking about there being Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Pagans, Catholics and Protestants, Born-agains and once-was-enoughers. I’m not talking about those who take the bible literally and those who don’t take it literally.

            When I talk about there being two kinds of religion in this country, very simply put, I’m talking about there being one kind of religion that puts an emphasis on being holy and another kind of religion that puts an emphasis on being compassionate.

            Let me say more about this distinction, and let me give credit where credit is due.

            I first learned about this distinction from Marcus Borg, a professor of religion at Oregon State University, reading one of his early books, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. In this book, Borg traces the history of this distinction back to the time of Jesus and describes the “purity system” of the first-century Jewish society in which Jesus lived.

            What’s a “purity system?” Well, purity codes are found mostly in the books of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy in the Hebrew Bible and they prescribe or proscribe contact with certain kinds of objects, foods, diseases, animals, and even people. A purity system, Borg says, is a social system organized around the polarities of pure and impure, clean and unclean.

            Part of the purity system in first-century Jewish society had to do with birth and into which one of several hereditary social classes a person was born. Purity also had to do with sex and gender. Men were thought to be more pure than women since natural bodily processes such as childbirth and menstruation were considered sources of impurity. Purity also had to do with physical wholeness and health. People who were maimed, disabled in any way, or chronically ill, such as lepers, were considered impure. Purity also depended on behavior. Certain professions, such as tax collectors and even shepherds were considered impure. Purity also depended on economic class. Rich people were not always considered pure, but being very poor almost certainly made one impure. People saw wealth as a blessing from God and poverty as punishment for sin. Poverty also kept people from practicing the “purity laws.” For example, poor people were unable to tithe to the temple, and tithing was linked with purity.

            Borg says, “The effect of the purity system was to create a world with sharp social boundaries, between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not sole, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile.” In many ways, the purity system gave religious justification to an exploitive social system.

            Much of Jesus’ ministry, Borg says, can be understood as a critique on the purity system. Many of the stories told about Jesus and many of the stories that Jesus told involved violations of purity codes, and the point of many of these stories was that compassion was more important than purity. As I’ve said before, Jesus practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love, saying that everybody should love everybody no matter what.

            The conflict between Jesus, who emphasized compassion, and the religious, political, and economic elites who emphasized purity and holiness can be summarized with the juxtaposition of two bible verses.

            Those who emphasized purity and holiness loved to cite Leviticus 19:2 : “You shall be holy, for I the Lord God am holy.” In response to this, Jesus said, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate.”

            This verse, by the way, is Luke 6:36. And by the way, it’s not a bad one to remember.

            I’ve told the story before about how I once ended up in a discussion with a man at Starbucks about same-sex marriage.

             “Is it true that Unitarian Universalist churches allow gay and lesbian people to get married?” the man asked.

“It is,” I said.

The man then began to quote the bible at me, chapter and verse, to convince me that same sex relationships are unholy.

So I asked him, “Is it more important to be holy or compassionate?”

“Holy,” he said.

 “That’s an interesting answer,” I said. “In Leviticus, it does say to be holy because God is holy, but in Luke 6:36 it says, “‘Be compassionate as God is compassionate.’ It seems like Jesus preferred compassion to holiness.”

The man just sat there, flustered, his face turning a bright red and his nostrils flaring. Then suddenly, in the middle of Starbucks, the man stood up, rising to his full height. He took a step back from where I was sitting and then pointed his finger at me and then shouted at me in a voice that could be heard throughout the restaurant, “Woe be unto you!” and stormed out the front door.

Just like in Jesus’ time, it seems that a lot of differences in how people understand what it means to be religious in this country can be understood in whether people think purity or holiness is most important or whether they think compassion is most important.

            According to those who think holiness is most important, the most important things are believing the right things and saying the right prayers in the right order. The things they’re worried about most in this country are things like foul language, dirty movies, the pernicious effects of video games, gambling, and especially, God help us, anything to do with sex, because they all know that sex is dirty and filthy, and that’s why you have to save it for the one you love.

            Of course, you’ve heard why some Baptist are opposed to sex? It could lead to dancing.

            For folks who are obsessed with purity, Jesus is not to be admired because of the selfless way he lived his life. For them, Jesus is a supernatural spot remover, able to absolve any inky blotch from any soiled soul.

            On the other hand, according to those who think compassion is most important, the things they’re worried about are things like, oh say, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, visiting the prisoner. Things based in compassion.

            I don’t want my words this morning to sound like an attack on any particular religious tradition.

            I think you find people who emphasize either holiness or compassion in every religious tradition in the world. In Hinduism, there are tensions between holiness and compassion. In Buddhism there are tensions between holiness and compassion. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there are tensions between holiness and compassion.

            Even in Unitarian Universalism, there are tensions between holiness and compassion, though they look a little different than in some other churches. Don’t think there are implicit purity codes in some Unitarian Universalist churches? Just ask somebody who eats at McDonalds rather than Marlenes, shops at Walmart rather than Trader Joes, drives an SUV with a McCain bumper sticker on it rather than a Prius with a Kuccinich bumper sticker on it while listening to KVI rather than KUOW if they’ve ever experienced a less-than-compassionate-hollier-than-thou attitude at a Unitarian Universalist church. Not that something like that would ever happen in this church…

            I want to suggest that when holiness gets stressed in any religious tradition, you get the things for which religion is worst known. Divisiveness. Hierarchy. Domination. Discrimination. Exploitation. Even violence. Because once you divide up the world between the holy and the unholy, you provide justification for doing violence to those considered unholy. I also want to suggest that when compassion gets stressed, you get the things for which religion is best known.  

            However, I want to try make an even bolder claim. It’s the first Sunday of the year after all, a time to make bold claims.

            One of the questions that I have wrestled with over the years is, “What does it mean to be a spiritual person? What does it mean to be a religious person? If living spiritually means living a life of fullness, richness, and depth - - if living spiritually means living in a way that is most satisfying to our spirits, to our deepest selves - - what is at the heart of what it means to be spiritual or religious?”

            I acknowledge that spirituality has many aspects. Certainly, compassion is a part of it. But so is awe, or what the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel called “radical amazement” at the miracle and mystery of creation and life within it. And so is a feeling of oneness with all that does exists, a feeling of interdependence with every other person and thing. And perhaps, so is a connection with that creative power within all existence, called by many names but known to every human heart. And so is gratitude, for the many blessings of our lives. And so is acceptance, for all in life that we cannot change or control. And so is commitment and faithfulness to values and actions that make the world more just and give our lives meaning.

            Should one of these get primacy in the spiritual or religious question? Is one of these, or some other aspect of spirituality, more important than all the others?

            As I have wrestled with this question, what I have come back to again and again, is that if any kind of spirituality is to be authentic, compassion must come first.

            At least I know this is true for me. Unless I put compassion first, it’s too easy to get stuck with my head in the clouds. It’s too easy to end up marveling at the mystery of the stars or the miracle of a flower in spring while my neighbor goes hungry.

            Of course, I’m not the only one to say this.

            Karen Armstrong has written a wonderful volume called The Great Transformation about the history of religion and once I have time in my life again to read 436 paged- books instead of reading Where’s Spot? 436 times, I will probably read it.

            But today, I can tell you what I’ve learned from reading the book jacket and skimming the introduction and conclusion. When we look at the different religious traditions of the world, we find a lot of variation in belief, yet there is one virtue that stands out in all of them: compassion.

            Similarly, Aldous Huxley gave an interview at the end of his life. Huxley is best known for his novel Brave New World, but he was also a scholar of the world’s religions. His interviewer asked, “Dr. Huxley, perhaps more than anyone else alive, you have studied the great spiritual and religious traditions of the world. What have you learned?” Huxley answered, “I think we could be a bit kinder.”

            And of course, there is what the novelist Henry James once said about the three most important things in human life… The first it to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

            And then there’s what Kurt Vonnegut wrote in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies - - ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’”

            I once asked one of my colleagues if it were up to him, what he would name the church he serves as minister. He said, only half-jokingly I think, “The Church of Love.” It wouldn’t be inappropriate. I’ve come to believe that the beginning - - not the end, but the beginning of spirituality - - is the ability to connect with another person, to feel their joy as if it were our own joy, to feel their pain as if it were our own pain, to know that they have the same fears, hopes, desires and yearnings as each of us do, and then to respond appropriately.

            To grow spirituality, then, is when we are able to widen that circle of compassion, until it includes all people, especially those who are different from us or even those, as Jesus said, who dislike us or even hate us. It may also mean widening that circle of compassion until it includes all sentient beings.

            But I believe we must start with those closest to us, our families, our neighbors, our friends, our co-workers, our fellow church members.

            We don’t want to end up like Mrs. Jelby, the character in Bleak House who woefully neglects her children while pursuing charitable causes overseas. She was a woman “with handsome eyes,” Dickens writes, “though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if…they could see nothing nearer than Africa.”

            “Charity,” Dickens said, “begins at home, and justice next door.”

            One of my recent challenges in being compassionate these days is trying to imagine how frustrating it must be to be 18-months old and to have so many feelings about so many things but not have the words to express very much. Another challenge is also to remember that my son did not purposely and deliberately change channels on the TV before dropping the remote control into the dog water, leaving us with only the Disney Channel to watch. Another recent challenge in being compassionate is to imagine how challenging, frustrating, and tiring it must be to suddenly be a stay-at-home mom.

            There are other frequent challenges in my life too.

            On New Year’s Day, Hiromi, Kai, and I took Abbey, our beagle, to Marymoor Park in Redmond. There was a woman in front of me at the parking ticket machine. She had gotten out of her car and appeared to be fumbling with the buttons.

            “I hope this fool doesn’t take forever,” I muttered to myself.

            Suddenly, the woman was walking toward my car window.

            “I didn’t know what I was doing and ended up buying two tickets,” she said. “Here,” she said, passing one through the window. “Happy New Year!” I fumbled for my wallet to pay her, and she waved her hand dismissively. “Happy New Year,” she said again.

            I felt ashamed and chastised by my conscience.

            We ministers are trained to be professionally nice, but the truth is I struggle everyday to not be as judgmental, indifferent, and uncaring as I sometimes am.

            Being compassionate is not easy. However, if we are to live the fullest, richest, deepest, most abundant and fulfilling lives that are possible for us, I believe it is where we must start, and if necessary start over again, and if necessary start over again after that.