Sermon delivered at All Souls Community Church

In Grand Rapids, Michigan

February 20, 2005

The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

In those days [of my childhood] ministers depended on revivals to save souls and reform the world.

In the winter, navigation having closed, business was mostly suspended…For real and virtuous enjoyment the good people depended on revivals.

The sermons were mostly about the pains and agonies of hell, the joys and ecstasies of heaven, salvation by faith, and the efficacy of the atonement... The emotional sermons, the sad singing, the hysterical amens, the hope of heaven, the fear of hell, caused many to lose the little sense they had. They became substantially insane. In this condition they flocked to the "mourner's bench" -- asked for the prayers of the faithful -- had strange feelings, prayed and wept and thought they had been "born again." Then they would tell their experience -- how wicked they had been -- how evil had been their thoughts, their desires, and how good they had suddenly become…

Of course all the people were not exactly of one mind. There were some scoffers, and now and then some man had sense enough to laugh at the threats of priests and make a jest of hell. Some would tell of unbelievers who had lived and died in peace.

Well, while the cold weather lasted, while the snows fell, the revival went on, but when the winter was over, when the steamboat's whistle was heard, when business started again, most of the converts "backslid" and fell again into their old ways. But the next winter they were on hand, ready to be "born again." They formed a kind of stock company, playing the same parts every winter and backsliding every spring.

The ministers, who preached at these revivals, were in earnest. They were zealous and sincere. They were not philosophers. To them science was the name of a vague dread -- a dangerous enemy. They did not know much, but they believed a great deal. To them hell was a burning reality -- they could see the smoke and flames. The Devil was no myth. He was an actual person, a rival of God, an enemy of mankind. They thought that the important business of this life was to save your soul -- that all should resist and scorn the pleasures of sense, and keep their eyes steadily fixed on the golden gate of the New Jerusalem. They were unbalanced, emotional, hysterical, bigoted, hateful, loving, and insane. They really believed the Bible to be the actual word of God -- a book without mistake or contradiction. They called its cruelties, justice – its absurdities, mysteries -- its miracles, facts, and the idiotic passages were regarded as profoundly spiritual. They dwelt on the pangs, the regrets, the infinite agonies of the lost, and showed how easily they could be avoided, and how cheaply heaven could be obtained. They told their hearers to believe, to have faith, to give their hearts to God, their sins to Christ, who would bear their burdens and make their souls as white as snow... In their minds the Devil had tried in vain to sow the seeds of doubt.

I heard hundreds of these evangelical sermons... I was not convinced…

But I heard one sermon that touched my heart, that left its mark, like a scar, on my brain.

One Sunday I went with my brother to hear a Free Will Baptist preacher. He was a large man, dressed like a farmer, but he was an orator. He could paint a picture with words.

He took for his text the parable of "the rich man and Lazarus." He described Dives, the rich man -- his manner of life, the excesses in which he indulged, his extravagance, his riotous nights, his purple and fine linen, his feasts, his wines, and his beautiful women.

Then he described Lazarus, his poverty, his rags and wretchedness, his poor body eaten by disease, the crusts and crumbs he devoured, the dogs that pitied him. He pictured his lonely life, his friendless death.

Then, changing his tone of pity to one of triumph – leaping from tears to the heights of exultation -- from defeat to victory -- he described the glorious company of angels, who with white and outspread wings carried the soul of the despised pauper (Lazarus) to Paradise -- to the bosom of Abraham.

Then, changing his voice to one of scorn and loathing, he told of the rich man's death. He was in his palace, on his costly couch, the air heavy with perfume, the room filled with servants and physicians. His gold was worthless then. He could not buy another breath. He died, and in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torment.

Then, assuming a dramatic attitude, putting his right hand to his ear, he whispered, "Hark! I hear the rich man's voice. What does he say? Hark! 'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.'"

"Oh, my hearers, he has been making that request for more than eighteen hundred years. And millions of ages hence that wail will cross the gulf that lies between the saved and lost and still will be heard the cry: 'Father Abraham! Father Abraham! I pray thee send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my parched tongue, for I am tormented in this flame.'"

For the first time I understood the dogma of eternal pain -- appreciated "the glad tidings of great joy." For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: "It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God."

From that day I have had no fear, no doubt. For me, on that day, the flames of hell were quenched. From that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed. That Sermon did some good.

The Samaritan Woman at the Well, John 4: 6-15

   ^{6Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.}

   7There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink.

   8(For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat.)

   9Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans.

   10Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

   11The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?

   12Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?

   13Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again:

   14But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

15The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.

The living water the Bible writer of John had Jesus offer the Samaritan woman at the well is not the stagnant, putrid water of past creeds, outdated beliefs, or threats of horrors in the next life for pleasures or sense experiences in this one. Living water is a symbol of an ever-present Spirit that ennobles human life and brings creation to a larger, wider fulfillment in the bonds of love and affection. Too often religion is an enemy of the Spirit symbolized by living water. That is why this Lenten sermon series, which we continue today through Easter, will take us far away from most of organized religion and especially today away from most Christian reading of the Bible and human nature.

Our subject today, the thinker who threatens past creeds, outdated beliefs, the threats religion uses disguised as love, is unlike our first thinker, Thomas Jefferson, who threatens religion because he declared what no religion today can declare: that all are created equal, and thus regardless of belief or unbelief, each man and women, all souls, are to be loved as created, a thought that strikes at the heart of every religion’s doctrine of the saved and damned, the washed and unwashed. And in subsequent Sundays you will hear other thoughts that strike down most of what we call religion in our time. But today our thinker threatens religion for the mere fact that he advocates thinking itself!

His grandfather was a Universalist and his father a Congregationalist minister whose books by the great theologians of history this man devoured as a child. He could read by age five, and though had no college training, became one of the nation’s greatest lawyers, was a confidant to two Presidents, gave the eulogy at Walt Whitman’s funeral, lent his style of cross-examination and closing argument to Clarence Darrow, and in political addresses spoke to 20,000 people in Elkhart, Indiana, 25,000 in Cleveland, and 30,000 in Chicago. A statue of him stands in his beloved Peoria, Illinois, where he played, and discovered politics and his oratorical calling in the 1850’s. When he went onto the lecture circuit in the late 1800’s to blast orthodox Christianity for its foolhardiness and the foreboding dread in instilled in human beings, he would regularly speak to 3,000 each night. It was estimated once that during his lecturing days he spoke to well over 100,000 a year! Robert Ingersoll, the great agnostic, “Royal Bob or Pope Bob,” the man whose voice was heard in the 19th century more than any other, lectured nine times in Grand Rapids, eight times at the Powers Opera House and once at Lockerby Hall, the old Auditorium which was once at the corner of Fountain and Ionia. The Powers Opera House, later the Powers Theater, was the first equipped opera house in West Michigan, seated 1600, and was built in 1873 by W.T. Powers who, along with D.A. Blodgett, was a member of one of the two local Unitarian churches in the city then. Both of them, and the large Universalist Church, disappeared in the first part of the 20th century, and, apparently, from the recollections and mind of modern Grand Rapids, too! Ingersoll even had a lecture cancelled in my hometown of Richmond, Indiana, because he “would not give assurances that ‘nothing offensive to Christianity would be in the lecture,’” so you native Grand Rapidians can retire the myth that this place in the late 19th and early 20th century was one of the most religiously conservative parts of the country. Why our city holds onto that myth, and the forgetfulness of liberal religion’s wider appeal here in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, than during the second half of the 20th century unto our own day, is something I do not understand.

It is like American culture’s myth of the conservative nature of our land in Ingersoll’s time, and our forgetfulness of the man in who in his time was heard by the largest percentage of our population EVER. The myths and forgetfulness that we cultivate is something I do not understand.

Robert Ingersoll was the most nationally recognized man of his time, championed by the likes of Robert LaFollette, Luther Burbank, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and vilified by Christian orthodoxy such that numerous times around the country thousands would join in mass prayer meetings to convert the Great Agnostic and at his death rumors were generated of his deathbed conversion. He did not.

One commentator noted that his ideas were not original, but his approach and his oratorical skills were. He popularized ideas that were the living water of the Enlightenment, the scientific mind, and rationality, what can be called modernism. Like Unitarian William Ellery Channing a generation before him Ingersoll extolled the virtues of reason when reading the Bible and shunned literalism. Ingersoll used sarcasm often to reveal the absurdities of doing otherwise, noting that according to his estimation Noah’s Ark contained “175,000 birds, 3,616 beasts, 1,300 reptiles, and 2,000,000 insects – all being cared for by eight uncommonly busy people.” Like Universalist Hosea Ballou before him, Ingersoll pronounced the Christian doctrine of the atonement – that Jesus was God’s only Son sent to suffer, die, and be resurrected for our sins – as a pernicious belief that denigrates man’s goodness and makes God a vicious murderer of his own child. Like his Universalist grandfather, Ingersoll waged war against the view of God derived from the Bible that would relegate any of his children to everlasting hellfire and damnation. Christianity, in terms of the organization and doctrines that have been handed down from the Church Councils of the three and four hundreds, had become the enemy of humankind by passing off as love its religion of fear, ignorance, irrationality, and what Ingersoll called the “infinite horror of eternal pain.”

Robert Ingersoll’s truth telling about religion resonated in the hearts of men and women who thought higher of humankind than did most religious folk. So much of religion in Ingersoll’s day, and in ours, is driven by fear. Beliefs and doctrines of human depravity arise when men and women fear themselves. Beliefs and doctrines of immortality arise when men and women fear death. Beliefs and doctrines of God’s wrath and punishment arise when men and women fear the glories and wonders of life. “This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, [of eternal damnation and punishment]” said Ingersoll, “made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor… It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge.” Yet, such a need inside of man, to create a belief and a God who will punish him, remains strong even in our day. The length and breadth of our self-loathing apparently knows no bounds or age. This is something I do not understand.

So much of religion in Ingersoll’s day, and in ours, is driven by ignorance. Scientific study reveals the intricate designs and patterns, and the unity of the natural world. The Bible was written before modern science was created, and so it does not carry any weight on scientific matters nor offer an intelligent design in any relevant, modern way. It cannot, and to think otherwise of the Bible displays a lack of respect for the texts and authors, or for the idea of inspiration itself. The Bible is a book written in a specific culture, during a specific time in human history, and therefore reflects the bias and narrownesses of its age and culture as surely as it would if it were written in ours. In a letter explaining a lecture he gave on Moses before a Grand Rapids audience, Ingersoll wrote:

For many years I have regarded the Pentateuch simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of the ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands of ideas inconsistent with known and demonstrated facts. To me it seemed almost a crime to teach that this record was written by inspired men; that slavery, polygamy, wars of conquest and extermination were right, and that there was a time when men could win the approbation of infinite Intelligence, Justice, and Mercy, by violating maidens and by butchering babes. To me it seemed more reasonable that savage men had made these laws; and I endeavored in a lecture, entitled "Some Mistakes of Moses," to point out some of the errors, contradictions, and impossibilities contained in the Pentateuch.

Maintaining ignorance as a cherished hallmark of faith is something I do not understand.

So much of religion in Ingersoll’s day, and in ours, is driven by irrationality. Reason is the foundation of belief and what we call truth. “An honest God is the Noblest Work of Man,” he said in Grand Rapids on February 4, 1880, “We are doing what little we can to hasten the coming of the day when society shall cease producing… truth in rags, and superstition robed and crowned. We are looking for the time when the useful shall be the honorable; and when Reason, throned upon the world's brain, shall be the King of Kings, and God of Gods.” (Gods, RI)

And no faith that teaches the “infinite horror of eternal pain” is properly fit to be a spirituality for human beings. Spirituality is the perfect health of the soul. It is noble, manly, generous, brave, free-spoken, superb… It is the child of this earth … [and] comes from no heaven, but it makes a heaven where it is.” (Spirituality, RI)

What Ingersoll extolled is the beginning of faith. To suggest otherwise is something I do not understand.

The gospel of Robert Ingersoll was that of human liberty: There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence. (Liberty) His gospel was from a careful study of Judaism, Christianity, philosophy, and all the disciplines that uncover human nature, summed up in the Biblical verse: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Yet, hear the words he spoke in Grand Rapids over a hundred years ago, not as words for his time but ours:

After all, we are improving from age to age... The religionists of our time are occupying about the same ground occupied by heretics and infidels of one hundred years ago. The church has advanced in spite, as it were, of itself. It has followed the army of progress protesting and denouncing, and had to keep within protesting and denouncing distance. If the church had not made great progress I could not express my thoughts… We have advanced.

We have advanced. Who would say that today would be labeled only as a heretic, of the right or left, political or religious. Yet, religiously as well as politically, I would shout Ingersoll’s words from the highest peak. WE HAVE ADVANCED. And those who do not understand the deep theological truth of that, are doomed. Diseases “advance.” Science advances. Culture and society advance. Even truth “advances,” for the heresies of yesterday are the stepping stones for today, and those who do not understand that are doomed. If we stand upon the shoulders of giants and see no further than they did, their lives were lived in vain because of our shortsightedness and betrayal.

Iconoclastic bombasts against Christian orthodoxy played in the Peoria of Ingersoll’s day but doesn’t in ours because the times are different and the stakes are higher. Largely today religion does not threaten with the eternal damnation of the soul as much as with something much more ominous. No longer is the main threat of religion enslavement to outdated doctrine. No longer, either, is there the suspicion that with more intellectual advancement humanity will no longer “need” religion, as was thought by many in Ingersoll’s time. There is a religious impulse within human nature that nothing can erase because it is part of being human. I would submit that the threat today comes not as everlasting hellfire, but as religion that seeks to destroy life itself. Today religion does less killing of the human spirit, and more of just killing. Whereas in Ingersoll’s time religion was symbolic death today it has become wedded to politics and become death itself.

What I have long liked about Robert Ingersoll is that we trade in the same currency. I think that is his appeal to people in our churches, too. We tender reason, science, the critical mind, intellectual freedom, a generous affection for all souls, a reasonable view of human nature, and a reasonable confidence in the capacities of humanity for goodness and justice and human rights, and not just the evil of which we are equally capable. Human freedom and political liberty, regardless of gender, race, or religion, are our inheritance as created beings and are what we need invest our most prized energies in.

But while we trade in the same currency, we live in different times and face different challenges. All Souls claims itself to be a religious community on a spiritual walk, with one another and with the souls of the human family yesterday and today. In other words, once our brother Robert Ingersoll assisted the human family in its liberation from orthodoxy, from what we do not any longer believe because it is unreasonable and pernicious. Finding out what it is unreasonable and pernicious to believe is an important first step in the liberation of all souls. But today you can’t stop with that one step, either. And today you need to know that it is just the first step along the pilgrimage of faith. If you only know what you don’t believe in, than you are stuck with Pope Bob in the 19th century, even disregarding his admonition to that time: “Liberty is the child of intelligence… [and] We have advanced. We have reaped the benefit of every sublime and heroic self-sacrifice, of every divine and brave act; and we should endeavor to hand the torch to the next generation, having added a little to the intensity and glory of the flame.” (Liberty, RI)

If you remain only with what you don’t believe, you do not live in your own century. Discovering the contours of your faith is what the pilgrimage that is All Souls Community Church is all about. It’s about realizing the Spirit exists, and how it exists, and is strengthened and extended when we feel and experience it in the continuing liberation and deepening affection within ourselves and amongst the human family. It is our destiny in the 21st century to engage and understand this Spirit, what it is and is not, and how our humanly formed religious beliefs and theologies uphold it and destroy it. What is at stake is not the soul of a man or a woman, but the existence of all creation. Today there needs be lives that live out a truth, fitted for our time and for those who are the natural inheritor of liberating lives from the past. There needs be those who drink deeply of this truth, this living water, and offer its soothing and sustaining refreshment for all to imbibe: There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.