Gods and Goddesses, Kings and Queens

 

 

The Rev. Ron Sala

The Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford

October 10, 2004

 

 

There’s a scene in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which Arthur, King of the Britons, meets a most unusual group of peasants. They have no idea they’re Britons, nor that they have a king. Instead, they live in an “anarcho-syndicalist commune”—a real rarity in the Middle Ages. When Arthur tries to assert his authority, one of them reacts, “Well, I didn’t vote for you!” Arthur tells her that one doesn’t vote for kings. Instead, he explains, speaking over rousing music, that,

 

The Lady of the Lake—her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!

 

One of the peasants laughs and says, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!”

One of the things that makes the scene funny, of course, is the anachronism that points up how far we’ve come over the centuries. Real medieval peasants wouldn’t have given divinely established monarchy a second thought. It was just the way things were.

And yet, the more things change the more the stay the same. Consider that no more than three men have ever been elected President of the United States without belonging to a Christian denomination. The last of these was Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln.

Many scholars back in the 1950’s expected Christianity to be dead by the 21^st century, and yet its power over culture and politics in our country remain strong. Elsewhere in the world, Moslem groups struggle for state power, while practitioners of traditional Chinese spirituality challenge their atheistic government.

I hope you’ll attend all three parts of our series on religion, the state, and politics and participate in the discussions after each sermon. The relationship between church and state in America is being challenged as never before, which has awesome ramifications for all our lives. Also, this is a vitally important election year. People seem to understand this. New voter registrations in Connecticut are up nearly 60% over the 2000 election.

How many here are registered to vote? If your not, you have till October 19^th. How many are going to vote?

But before we can see the future clearly, we need to understand the past. I can’t cover the entire history of the planet in 20 minutes this morning. What I would like to do is present you with some snapshots of some of the ways our fellow humans have approached religion and politics.

Religion and politics are two great forces that have shaped human lives and societies since time immemorial.

Religion binds us to ultimate meaning. It gives us a sense of our place in the cosmos, why we’re here, and how we should spend our limited span of life.

Politics negotiates our relations with other human beings. It weighs rights and responsibilities, wealth and want, status and equality.

Those who are successful in the politics of their tribe constitute the state. The definition of this success that enables rule varies widely. It might be having a parent who was a king or queen, being appointed by a prophet, impressing a council of wise women, or being popular with soccer moms or NASCAR dads.

Of course, many throughout history have gotten ahead not through politics, but through less polite means. The two sides of British House of Commons are separated by a gap two and a half sword lengths wide. Traditionally, this was to ensure that the members of parliament exchanged only words and not steel. Politics is a substitute for violence. Anyone who finds it boring or distasteful should consider the alternative.

Religion, politics, and the state have never been far apart. Each society in every age forms a synthesis by which its members understand their duties toward the divine and each other.

One of humanity’s earliest documents is The Code of Hammurabi, written in Babylon, present day Iraq, nearly 4,000 years ago. Listen to the opening words of the Code, filled with references to Hammurabi’s right to rule, guaranteed by the Gods and Goddesses of his people:

 

When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak….

 

Well, the kingdom of Babylon was not everlasting like Hammurabi predicted it would be. But religious justification for state power has proven much more durable. And I can’t help but note the tendency of some of our politicians to talk, in the words of the ancient king, about destroying “evil-doers.” The more things change, the more they stay the same….

Hammurabi is sometimes referred to as a priest-king. This is certainly a role not limited to Babylon. The Shilluk [shi-LUKE] people of Sudan are still ruled by a sacred king. They believe him to incarnate their people’s God-hero, Nyikang. When the king is seen to be falling down on his duties, such as when there’s a severe drought, he may be killed by one of the princes so that Nyikang might live in a more suitable host.[1]

Also on the African continent, Egypt was ruled by divine kings and queens. Both the pharaoh and his wives wore the likenesses of sacred vultures or cobras on their heads. Little is known of many of the queens of Egypt, but there are those who stand out. Ahmose-Nefertari was the wife and sister (we are talking about ancient Egypt here) of the first pharaoh of the 18^th Dynasty. She was quite powerful and was the first in Egypt to be given the title “Wife of God.” A few generations later, Queen Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh in her own right.[2]

In ancient Greece and Rome also, religion played a vital part in legitimizing the state. Athens had its own cult, which Socrates was condemned for ignoring. The Roman emperors were often said to be descendents of various Gods and Goddesses. Julius Caesar and Augustus were declared to have been Gods themselves following their deaths. The mad emperor Caligula had the head lopped off a statue of Jupiter and put his own likeness in its place. And a temple was built in Britain to honor the God-emperor Claudius.

One of the most important functions of Roman religion to the empire was to put a divine sanction on war. New conflicts were declared in the Temple of Avenging Mars in Rome. And the doors of Janus’s temple stood open whenever the legions were engaged in campaigns. They very rarely closed.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, another civilization was continuing to develop that would have a tremendous impact on our own. The Israelites had a different approach to religion and state. Government was, at least theoretically, under the control of the divine realm. At the earliest period, Israelite religion may have featured a God-Goddess pair, but in historical times it was under the rule of a single, emphatically male warrior God. Early rulers in Israel were called “judges.” They often had prophetic as well as military functions. Two examples of this dual role are Deborah and Gideon, who not only sent out armies but are depicted as giving oracles and conversing with angels. Later, both religious and political power would be consolidated at Jerusalem under a high priest and a king.

There’s a passage in the book of 1 Samuel that speaks of this conversion to monarchy. It’s as powerful a testament against the consolidation of power as any ever written. The people have demanded that the old prophet Samuel appoint them their first king. He tells them,

 

These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11b-18)

 

But the people would not listen to the old man. They wanted a king to lead them into battle. And things turned out much the way Samuel had said. The wealth of the land was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The oppression eventually became so great that during the reign of King Solomon’s son Rehoboam people rebelled and the kingdom was permanently split in two.

Was the warning against kings actually from the prophet Samuel, as Biblical literalists would assert? Or was it inserted into the text, after the fact, by a later generation who had seen

But even with all the excesses of the kings and queens of the Israelites, we do not read of them being worshipped as Gods. Nor were they priests. There was an independent priesthood as well as independent prophetic schools. The prophets were not so much predictors of events taking place now as the televangelist variety of Christianity would have it. They were perhaps more … performance artists, protest artists. Think about it: they purported to channel the words of a disembodied Supreme Being. And this Being they claimed to hear occasionally asked them to do odd things, like telling a king that he should not have committed adultery and murder. Or the Being tells them to marry a whore, or bury their underwear, or lying for extended periods on one side of the body or the other. Through such theatrics and fiery rhetoric these prophets often criticized the kings, who, after all, were merely mortal human beings, subject to their God’s evaluation just like everyone else.

Sometimes the result of this struggle with the temporal powers-that-be would be a repentant king, like King David after Nathan the prophet put him in an emotional chokehold over the Bathsheba incident. (He did it with a short story about a pet lamb.) Sometimes the result was a prophet being thrown in a cistern or being regarded as mad by the people. But many of their words were recorded and their ethical precepts have influenced all three of the great Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Meanwhile, in China, there were voices who questioned the ways their society operated. One of the greatest was Mo-Tse, a.k.a. Mocius, the 5^th century BCE founder of Mohism, who wrote our traditional reading this morning:

 

When all the people of the world love,

Then the strong will not overpower the weak.

The many will not oppress the few.

The wealthy will not mock the poor.

The honored will not disdain the humble.

The cunning will not deceive the simple.

Mo-Tse was against offensive warfare but wanted a stronger state that would regulate people’s ethical behavior. He believed in the importance of honoring heaven by reverencing one’s ancestors.

Mo-Tse also taught universal love, just like Buddha and Jesus. The first of these would inspire a king who lived 300 years after his death. That king’s name was Ashoka, and he followed Buddha by preferring missionary work to warfare and greatly expanded the following of the Buddhist way.

The other of these teachers, Jesus, taught love for enemies and humble service to one’s fellow persons. Jesus’ way of unconditional, godlike love upset the social order and led to much persecution for those who dared follow him. In their earliest days, Christians challenged the unequal status of men and women, slave and free, natives and foreigners. In fact, Jesus way of love was quite different from the “way of the world” practiced by the purportedly divine Roman emperors. In their time, the emperors were the most powerful men on earth. Those who opposed them often met death prematurely. One of the crimes of early Christians, in the eyes of Rome, was their refusal to burn incense as a token of Caesar worship. Many Christians died in the prisons and arenas of the Empire. Yet, by the year 325, the Emperor himself was a Christian. Christianity went from being an outlaw religion to a sanctioned one. One might say that the motto of a truly oppressive government is, “That which is not forbidden is mandatory. That which is not mandatory is forbidden.” Such was the case in Rome only six years after the first Christian emperor, Constantine, called the Council of Nicea, when the Pagan temples were closed. The Council of Nicea, you could say, married the idealistic, radical, independent young bride of the
Church to the decayed old man of imperial power. In the process, Unitarianism became a Heresy, followed two centuries later by Universalism. Christianity went from a spontaneous spiritual practice to a codified, statist institution.

As the Roman Empire collapsed into city-states, and nations, the Roman Church became a lone unifying force in a sea of political chaos. It even gathered together its own state over the centuries, whittled down now to Vatican City, which is, of course, its own country.

Throughout Europe, a huge religious change took place with the old Gods giving way to the one God. From now on, there would be no more god-kings in Europe. There were kings who purported to rule by God’s command, but they were not Gods. The sacred and the secular took a small step apart, and yet religious liberty was nowhere to be found. Pagans could not practice their old ways openly. And anyone who interpreted Christianity differently from the official Church version was in danger. But great changes were yet to come.

In next week’s sermon, I’ll continue the story with how the Western world went from a universal, compulsory religion to a complete fragmentation into thousands of religions, cults, and sects. We’ll learn about how Martin Luther split church and state into “two kingdoms” and how early Unitarians created the first religiously tolerant nation. We’ll also explore how our American founders saved religion and the state from each other, and how that soon might no longer be the case.

After the hymn, I look forward to your reflections.