“Can You Be Good Without God?"

“Can You Be Good Without God?"
Mark 7: 24-30, James 2: 14-26, Proverbs 22
September 6, 2009 – Proper 18
First United Church – Sermon by Caela Simmons Wood

Unless you’re new to town, you probably know that some of the Bloomington Transit busses have ads on them that proclaim, “You can be good without God.”

The Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign took out these ads in hopes of spreading a positive message about atheism and sparking “lively public discussion about the secular nature of morality.”

As I’ve watched the whole thing unfold in the media, I’ve found it interesting that most of the conversation has centered around the ads that say, “You can be good without God.” There is another ad that says, “In the beginning, man created God.” As a person of faith, I find the idea that humans created God to be troubling and a perhaps a bit inflammatory. But the idea that you can “be good without God” doesn’t really bother me.

After all, I’ve known plenty of people who were plenty good, but didn’t profess a belief in any deity. And I’ve known plenty of people who go to church every Sunday, but you sure couldn’t tell it by the way they acted the other six days of the week.

Morality and religion often go hand-in-hand, but I think that when we center the conversation about religion around morality, we’re missing a big part of what it means to be a person of faith.

As a Christian, I have to say that my decision to follow Christ isn’t primarily about figuring out how to do the right thing.

I had plenty of elementary school teachers who taught me lots about how to treat other people and the planet without saying a word about Jesus.

If being religious was primarily about figuring out how to be good, I’d probably try and choose a religion that was a little more easily understood than Christianity. After all, why go to all the trouble of trying to figure out the mysteries of why the four gospels can’t even agree with each other about who Jesus was if I could just “be good” without God?!?

Following in the way of Christ isn’t primarily about being good. It’s about being radically transformed.

It’s about a yearning to be united with a power that is so extreme, so radical, so pure – even death cannot contain it.

It’s about cracking open an ancient book and puzzling over stories like the doozey we have in Mark today.

It’s about experiencing the reality of the Holy One in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup – having your breath taken away as you sense your connection to all the other people who have come to the Table filled with a yearning to be made whole.

It’s about surrendering yourself to the realization that you were created by a divine force that your eyes cannot see, your ears cannot hear, and your hands cannot touch – and resting in the assurance that this Sacred Glimmer is the being that loves you more than anyone else in all of creation.

Following in the way of Christ isn’t primarily about being good. It’s about being radically transformed.

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Our texts for today dance around this question – what is religion for, anyway? During the children’s sermon, the kids read us some Proverbs from the 22nd chapter of that book. The Proverbs are, in a lot of ways, like those posters that your elementary school teachers hung up around the walls of your classroom to help you learn how to behave. Short sayings – rarely more than two lines long – that could easily be recited and passed down from elders to children.

Some of these sayings were about God, “The rich and the poor have this in common, the Lord is the maker of them all.” And others could easily be put on the side of a bus by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign – they don’t say much about God at all, such as, “The clever see danger and hide, but the foolish keeping going and suffer for it”

If you were trying to sort out what it meant to seek God and just had Proverbs to go on, you might walk away with the understanding that religion is primarily about teaching you how to be good with God.

But the next story for today, from Mark 7, would send you in an entirely different direction! The main character in this story, a nameless Syrophoenecian woman, doesn’t seem to care much at all about being good.
She is driven into the standoffish presence of Jesus by sheer desperation. Her daughter is being tortured by a demon and she doesn’t know who else to turn to. We have no indication that she seeks to become a follower of Jesus – only that she believes he can do something alleviate her family’s misery.

Jesus heals her daughter – not because of the woman’s faith, as is reported in Matthew’s version of this story – but simply because she stands up to him when he tries to wave her away.

Incidentally, I’ve got to say that if you slept through the Gospel reading this morning, you’re probably lucky. Jesus is at his most troubling in this passage, calling this poor mother a “dog” and initially refusing to help her. There are multiple theories out there to try to explain away Jesus’s bad behavior – none of which are totally satisfying to me. If you want to know more about them, please come talk to me.

Regardless of Jesus’s behavior, though, the woman’s desperation and persistence sheds light on our ponderings about whether you can be good without God. This godless woman didn’t care an ounce about being good – she even smarted off to an esteemed Rabbi when he was rude to her. Her desperation drove her to transformation...and her encounter with the Holy provided much needed relief for her daughter.

And then we come to our final text for today – the passage from James 2. The author certainly has a few strong opinions about the relationship of morality to religion. James says that we’ll never get anywhere if we just learn all the right words but never do anything. Or in another translation, it says “faith without works is dead.”

There is something about morality – choosing to “be good” – and faith in God that go together. They are not easily separated.

James says, “You can no more show me your works apart from your faith than I can show you my faith apart from my works. Faith and works, works and faith, fit together hand in glove.”

Sure, you can have faith, but if you don’t do anything with it there’s no point in having it. And you can be good without God, but you’ll be missing out another part of the equation – that transformational, soul-shocking, life-changing, world-turning-upside-downing thing called faith.

James says, and I agree, that the whole point of following Christ is to have both – a model for how to be good and a faithful relationship with the One who shocks us out of complacency and into our true calling as beings created in the image of God.

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Sara Miles is a woman who knows a thing or two about how faith and works are not easily separated.

The back cover of her book, Take This Bread (which is available in our library) summarizes her story nicely, “Early one morning, for no earthly reason, Sara Miles, raised an atheist, wandered into a church, received communion, and found herself transformed…A lesbian left-wing journalist…Miles didn’t discover a religion that was about angels or good behavior or piety; her faith centered on real hunger, real food, and real bodies. Before long, she turned the bread she ate at communion into tons of groceries, piled up on the church’s altar to be given away. Within a few years, she and the people she served had started nearly a dozen food pantries in the poorest parts of [San Francisco].”

Miles was raised by atheist parents and taught how to be good without God. Miles says, “My parents went to foreign films, took us to Europe to visit friends, and taught us to read between the lines of a newspaper, but they skimped, to say the least, on religious education. I had a book of Greek myths…but no idea who Abraham or Isaiah or Mary were. ‘Some people,’ my father said to me once, as if patiently explaining the customs of a faraway tribe, ‘believe that Jesus was a god.’ He paused. ‘And some people think he was just a very, very good man. A teacher.’”

But even without a religious upbringing, Miles learned to value other human beings and do the right thing. She traveled to far off countries, reporting on areas wrecked by wars. She surrounded herself with people who appreciated her love and care. She gave birth to a beautiful daughter, Katie, who taught her about what it meant to truly be alive.

And then, Miles writes, when she was 46 years old, “early one winter morning…I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming Christian – or, as I thought of it rather less politely – a religious nut.”

Miles sat in the worship service and tried her best to be invisible, but found herself moving with the others as they moved “in a stately dance to the table in the rotunda.” Before she knew what was happening, someone put a piece of “fresh, crumbly bread” into her hands and passed her a “goblet of sweet wine.”

When she ate the bread and drank the cup, she says, “Something outrageous and terrifying happened to me. Jesus happened to me.”

She was in tears, feeling like she had just “stepped off a curb or been knocked over.” She left the church bewildered. She knew nothing about Jesus. Nothing about Christianity. But something real happened to her when she ate the body and blood of Christ. She says “that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb.”

She kept going back. Shyly at first – sitting in the back, eating the bread, drinking the wine, crying and running away. After about a year of this, one of the priests noticed her regular attendance and - you know how we are when we notice someone’s regular attendance and put them to work – he asked if she would be willing to serve as a deacon and serve communion.

She agreed to serve, and it was out of this powerful experience of giving away the bread and cup that she began to have a vision.

Her vision was of something “sort of like Sunday communion” where people from all over would come to the altar table and receive, not the elements of Holy Communion, but onions and cereal and potatoes and flour and butter to stock their pantries. No identification would be needed, no limit would be set on the amount of food that could be taken, and it would all happen around that beautiful altar table in the sanctuary where she had first experienced Christ.

As you can imagine, when the nice “church people” at St. Gregory’s heard what she wanted to do, they were less than thrilled. The devil was in the details and people were worried about all kinds of things. What about when people came outside of the regular hours? Would these poor people be hanging around the church day and night? And how would they manage to keep the kitchen clean when they couldn’t even keep it clean without poor people mucking it up? And, perhaps most importantly, how on earth could she be thinking about serving poor people from their new altar – hand-built, polished hardwood in the style of an early Palestinian altar that cost $6,000?!?

To their credit, the people of St. Gregory’s eventually got over their fear of outsiders and learned to truly practice what they preached every Sunday during communion – an open table, meant to feed and nourish all who came seeking sustenance.


Miles opened her food pantry and served people groceries right out of the sanctuary and right off of that $6,000 altar table.

The food pantry is still going strong today and if you go to St. Gregory’s website, you can see a video of how they serve people each week. It’s a jubilant atmosphere that looks a lot like a farmer’s market, not a food pantry.

Was Sara Miles able to be good without God? You bet. But, in the end, her conversion to Christianity wasn’t about a desire to be good. It was about a hunger so deep and so real that she didn’t even know it existed until she walked into a church and was fed the body and blood of Christ.

In that moment – in that simple act of being nourished – her life was radically transformed.

Sure, she could have continued right on – being good without God.

But why on earth would she have wanted to?