Religious Hunger                                                                  7/2/44

 

Scripture:  Psalm 42

 

Text:  Psalm 42: 1;  “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”  [the cry of a great man, hungry for God in his life.]

 

There are those who doubt that there is such a thing as religious hunger.  They tell us that what we suppose is an inborn need for religion is simply the result of superstition.  We are told that we have been led and tricked by professional religionists into believing and doing many foolish things; that we try to please a God because we are afraid to run the risk of suffering in a possible life after death.  Criticisms like these have been repeated generation after generation in various ways.

 

Critics have tried to tell us that we have cherished dogmas, coaxed supernatural beings, recited creeds, bowed before altars, built churches and gone through services for so many generations, through hundreds of years, that we have simply formed a religious habit.  They have tried to maintain that it is merely habit and that we are mistaken when we say that there is something like a religious hunger back of it all - a fundamental urge that will not be denied.

 

Probably no one here believes that.  Because those who do actually and sincerely believe it do not usually trouble themselves to go to church.  They are usually perfectly consistent about it.  So any attempt to refute their arguments from a pulpit are useless so far as reaching them is concerned.  But it may be of use to us to suggest an answer to that challenge when it is thrown at us.

 

No doubt habit has had a great deal to do with bringing many of us here.  It may be that some people are found in churches today chiefly because it is a habit with them to go there on Sunday morning.  But, on the other hand, there are many who have fought the habit of not going to church.  They may have started attending regularly through curiosity, or through urging someone else, or through the desire to do the thing regularly.  Now it can not be said of these people that they attend church because of habit or because their forefathers had the habit, can it?  In other words, it took effort to build the habit of going to church. 

 

There is another thing that is hard for the adverse critics of religious hunger to explain.  How does it happen that so many of them go at it with such enthusiasm?  Many atheists, agnostics and infidels seem to be driven by something so similar to the thing we call religious hunger that it is difficult to tell the difference.  They do many of the same things which they condemn in the faithful.  They form societies (like the society for the promotion of atheism) and preach their criticisms with the zeal of an evangelist.  They have written books, published magazine articles and distributed tracts, frequently at a great deal of personal expense and trouble, in order to enlighten the world according to their way of thinking.  There is often much enthusiasm in their meetings.  The fire in some of their oratory would do credit to many Christian preachers.  Their propaganda is in many respects typically missionary.

 

Why should they do all these things?  Simply because they can’t help it.  They are really driven by an impulse which parallels what we call religious hunger.  It seems that none of us can be spiritually content unless we devote ourselves to some cause which we believe will increase human happiness - something greater than ourselves.

 

In 1917, it was announced that the Russian revolution had done away with religion in that land forever.  Priests were exiled, churches and their treasures were confiscated, and altars of all sorts were overthrown.  The revolutionists seemed to believe that they were freeing the people from one long superstition.  And, of course, there is something to be said for their feeling.  The established church of Russia was said to have become a crude and cruel thing.  The savage resentment of some against is was naturally extreme.  And I suppose it was natural that they should judge all religion by the caricature of it with which they were acquainted.

 

But they forgot to reckon with their own souls.  When the enthusiasm of their image-breaking was worn out, many of the revolutionists were aware of something greatly lacking in their lives.  They wanted faith.  They needed religion.  And some of them began seeking for it in spite of repression and threats of punishment from the government.  Perhaps 8 years after that revolution there came the story of a new kind of religious movement in Moscow.  I think it was called “Red Chimes: the church of the toilers.”  The movement was in charge of a Protestant preacher who wrote that, in his opinion, there was more searching and thinking on the problem of religion in Russia than in any other part of the world.  And this community pulpit was established in Moscow in response to the inborn impulse toward religion that was asserting itself again in the Russian people.  That church was forbidden to advertise, could not take subscriptions, was not allowed to charge admission to its lectures.  But a small notice on the door of the beautiful old church building was enough to fill the building twice each Sunday.  They had Russian orthodox services in the morning.  And in the evening they had a forum in which any opinion, whatsoever, had a right to be expressed.

 

The building was not heated in winter.  There were not enough seats, and more than half of the audience must stand.  But they lingered there from six o’clock until midnight to discuss subjects all of which relate in some way to religion.  Their souls were being fed.

 

It would seem that the reality of the human hunger for religion is demonstrated in the fact that many people attend churches, and otherwise show their interest in religion, quite apart from habit.  And it seems demonstrated also by this turning again of many of the Russian people who had been supposed to have repudiated the whole business.

 

Another convincing demonstration of the hunger for religion is the multitude of books, which have continued coming off the press, books which deal with religion or religious subjects.  Books are not published unless they can be sold.  People are buying and reading these books in sufficient quantities to pay the publishers.  The world has never seen anything like it.  We have a strange paradox here.  At times when some churches have been struggling, there are millions who are actually interested in books and magazine articles on religion.  A religious literature of high quantity and quality is being eagerly bought and read by great numbers of people.

 

A significant trend in much of this writing on the subject of religion is that the tone has quite changed from the controversial tone of a couple of decades ago.  Writers have frankly accepted the conclusions of modern science and scholarship.  They have not only accepted the truths uncovered by science, but the limitations of scientific investigation.  Thoughtful men have set themselves to the task of reconstructing their religious ideas so that where a narrow faith fell in ruins, a better founded faith shall rise.

 

Walter Lippman illustrated a trend.  He did not use the expression “religious hunger” anywhere in his book, A Preface to Morals.  But a reading of some of the pages of the book gave the impression that he was dealing with the subject.  He classifies into three groups those who have broken away from the religious approach of their fathers.  He concerns himself, not with those who are satisfied with old doctrines and orthodoxies, but with those who have been thrown adrift from them and have not found rest anywhere else.  Some of these who are drifting have been defiant.  They are doubters and fighters and they don’t care who knows it.  Some are indifferent.  Perhaps those who are indifferent are the chief difficulty to progress in religion.  Nothing that falls under the name “religious” seems to interest the indifferent.  Many of them allow themselves to be preoccupied entirely by finance, clothes, automobiles, amusement, secularized politics, social power, or sometimes by all of them.

 

A third group, separate from those who are defiant or indifferent, is made up of those who feel a great lack, a vacancy, in their lives.  That class, Mr. Lippman believes, is small though increasing.

 

I think that there is a fourth class, not mentioned by Mr. Lippman, made up of those who have found a satisfying sort of belief.  And many of those who are found in our churches today are in this class.  They have stood by and wrestled with the problem until faith has arisen in finer form than ever before in their lives.

 

I do not see that much can be done by the churches for those who are defiant or indifferent until they come to a point where they are dissatisfied and conscious of the hunger and religious lack in their souls.  But surely we who love God must be able to offer some new, more vital and satisfying spiritual food to those who know that their unrest and craving is due to their soul hunger for tenable religion.  Some of them almost envy those who still have a simple and trusting faith in all that they think preachers, priests and Sunday School teachers have ever told them in the past.  They feel that they must be intellectually honest with themselves, but they long for the equivalent of the happiness that goes with a trusting faith, because they know that there is steadying power to be found there.  With all their hearts, they long for it.

 

Now just what is the state of mind for which the religiously discontented people seek?  Is it mental certainty?  Perhaps.  There are some people whose chief concern is to understand everything clearly.  But they are comparatively few and are never satisfied, because religion can never be entirely reduced to creeds and logical statements.  Our understanding of religion is never complete and never final.  When it comes to the mental side of religion, we have to learn to be satisfied with the best statements of faith which we can find - statements which do not violate the truths we have already learned.  We have to be prepared to state our belief in better ways as we learn more.

 

I doubt if mental certainty is what  we really inwardly want, anyway.  There is a kind of religious hunger in the extreme conservative which dogmatism will satisfy.  Persons of that sort need a dogmatic religion.  It answers all their questions without much taxing of the mind.  But the persons of whom Lippman is speaking are repelled rather than attracted by it.  They want their hunger satisfied but they want, at the same time, freedom to believe what seems right to them.  No, people are not primarily seeking mental certainty in religion.

 

Are people seeking to be let alone?  Perhaps.  Some Protestant churches are criticized because they won’t let people alone.  Lippman scores the liberal churches hardest on this point.  Instead of letting the hungry seeker enjoy his worship in peace, many leaders try to stir him up.  When he wants to relax mind and soul and enjoy the beauty of a service, he is bothered by a sermon that tries to convince him of something and sometimes that something is that some other theological camp is all wrong.  Perhaps some people want to be let alone so that they can feed their hunger on what they can find in the service.  But that is not all, either.

 

What is it that gives us a sense of well-being?  What makes the efforts of our life worth while?  What drives us from day to day, against odds, when it would be so much easier to give up?  It is the feeling that somehow what we do makes a difference to God and our part of the world.  It is the feeling that one is an important part of the movement.  And when one gets that feeling, knowing that the whole universe is at its best only when he is in his best shape, one has food for the satisfaction of his soul hunger.

 

Both our old theologies and our newer theologies had that.  The doctrine of the atonement made you important because Christ, a god in the flesh, died for you and wiped out your sins.  You were worth all that.  Now some people have felt that they could not cling to the doctrine of the atonement.  And they threw it out.  But along with the doctrine, they threw out the worth and value of the human life.  As William James said, they threw out the “baby with the bath water.”

 

The old universe was a cozy affair.  The earth was a disk of dirt; hell was a cavern just beneath it; the world was covered by the blue bowl vault of heaven studded with stars and with paths for the sun and moon; the windows of the vault opened and admitted rain.  Beyond the vault was God sitting on a throne in a place called Heaven.

 

Where is that universe now?  Vanished into historic memory.  The earth is now know to be a huge ball made up of countless atoms of matter, each atom made with potential power of unknown quantity and quality.  The earth is itself only a small speck whirling through vast spaces filled with other specks, some of them many times as large.  God is much greater than one who sits in a big room or city.  His abode, or heaven, is different and more vast than the early fathers believed.  It is a spiritual abode.

 

Yet the most important feature of the older religious beliefs is not in the outgrown ideas, or mental concepts.  The most important fact that is still as true today as ever, is that man is worth something in the sight of God.  All the great prophets and religious leaders have believed and taught this.  Hosea preached justice and mercy for the poorest and most downtrodden.  Likewise did Amos and Micah and Isaiah.  In another religious faith, Mohammed set himself to abolish the practice of putting unwanted girl babies to death.  Abdul-Baha pleaded for the abolition of poverty and the care of the needy.  The value of all human life, of every soul, rich or poor, sick or sound, exalted or humble was the main burden of Our Lord’s preaching ministry.

 

Here we can surely anchor ourselves.  We somehow surely do count in this world.  If each atom has its place in the chemical and physical makeup of this world, how much more certainly does each human life have a place!  God is our Father.  No matter what is his nature, where he is to be found, what he is doing, he is still our Father and we are cared for just as all things in his world are cared for.  To a father all his children are of worth, and the child knows that he can depend on the Father.

 

Therefore we worship God and seek to know his will so that we may work rightly and well in His service.

 

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Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wailuku Union Church, September 21, 1930

            Kahului Union Church, September 28, 1930

            Puunene Japanese Church, October 12, 1930

            Paia Japanese Church, December 7, 1930

            Kahului Union Church, July 16, 1933

            Puunene Hawaiian Church, May 5, 1935

            Pilgrim Church, Honolulu, November 14, 1937

            Wisconsin Rapids, July 2, 1944