William H. Willimon - "Projection" (August 20, 2000)
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| - | Hermann Hesse, who was big back in the '60s, | 0:07 |
| when I was a student, wrote in the 1920s, | 0:12 | |
| "There is no reality except that which is contained within. | 0:18 | |
| "That is why so many people live such an unreal life. | 0:26 | |
| "They take the images outside of them for reality. | 0:30 | |
| "They never allow the real world within to assert itself." | 0:34 | |
| It's hard to believe that there was a time | 0:42 | |
| when someone actually had to argue that point. | 0:44 | |
| Today, for many modern people, all reality | 0:49 | |
| is circumscribed within the self, within our subjectivity. | 0:55 | |
| Now, we all believe | 1:02 | |
| that there is no there there except within. | 1:04 | |
| That is until Sunday, when we are assaulted | 1:12 | |
| by the intrusive words of Scripture. | 1:16 | |
| And every time we pick up the bible, | 1:20 | |
| we challenge Hesse's assumption that there is no reality | 1:22 | |
| except that contained within me. | 1:27 | |
| If we've dreamed up a God all by ourselves | 1:32 | |
| from within ourselves, well then how do you explain | 1:36 | |
| weird words of scripture such as the ones | 1:42 | |
| for this Sunday from the weird Gospel of John. | 1:45 | |
| Jesus said, "I am the living bread come down from heaven. | 1:50 | |
| "Whoever eats this bread will live forever. | 1:56 | |
| "And the bread that I will give | 2:00 | |
| "for the life of the world is my flesh." | 2:02 | |
| The Jews, who disputed among themselves saying, | 2:07 | |
| "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" | 2:10 | |
| Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I say to you, | 2:15 | |
| "unless you eat the flesh of the son of man | 2:19 | |
| "and drink his blood, there is no life in you. | 2:22 | |
| "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood | 2:27 | |
| "have eternal life, and I will raise them up | 2:29 | |
| "on the third day, for my flesh is true food | 2:32 | |
| "and my blood is true drink. | 2:38 | |
| "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood | 2:40 | |
| "abide in me, and I in them. | 2:42 | |
| "Just as the living father sent me | 2:46 | |
| "and I live because of the father, | 2:52 | |
| "so whoever eats me will live because of me. | 2:54 | |
| "This is the bread that came down from heaven, | 2:59 | |
| "not that which your ancestors ate and they died, | 3:02 | |
| "but the one who eats this bread will live forever." | 3:06 | |
| He said these things | 3:10 | |
| when he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum. | 3:12 | |
| When many of his disciples heard it, | 3:16 | |
| they said, "This teaching is difficult. | 3:18 | |
| "Who can accept it?" | 3:23 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 3:27 | |
| (crowd murmurs) | 3:30 | |
| I vividly remember when a student | 3:33 | |
| emerged from the Easter service here, and he said to me, | 3:35 | |
| "You know, I now know what you Christians are up to. | 3:41 | |
| "We studied all about this in philosophy. | 3:45 | |
| "It's called projection." | 3:48 | |
| "Feuerbach said that we've got this desire in us | 3:52 | |
| "to live forever. | 3:57 | |
| "And therefore, we projected this infantile wish, | 3:58 | |
| "and we named that God." | 4:03 | |
| And I replied in love, | 4:07 | |
| "Well, that just shows how stupid you are." | 4:10 | |
| (crowd laughs) | 4:12 | |
| "If we were going to project a God, | 4:14 | |
| "we would not have projected this God. | 4:16 | |
| "We have demonstrated time and again | 4:20 | |
| "throughout human history that we are capable of producing | 4:22 | |
| "a more accessible and likable God than this one." | 4:26 | |
| But the boy's thinking is quite typical of the modern world. | 4:31 | |
| The modern view of God as mere infantile wish projection | 4:36 | |
| was born in March of 1907 when Sigmund Freud read a paper | 4:42 | |
| in Vienna called Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices. | 4:48 | |
| In that paper, Freud claimed, on the basis of his work | 4:54 | |
| with neurotic patients, that "the petty ceremonials | 4:58 | |
| "of religion are a sort of personality sickness. | 5:04 | |
| "God is only a symptom of inner insecurities. | 5:09 | |
| "One might venture to regard religion | 5:15 | |
| "as a universal obsessional neurosis." | 5:18 | |
| Religious people are sick. | 5:23 | |
| Now you know that it is of the nature of modernity | 5:28 | |
| to reduce complex human phenomena | 5:31 | |
| to something which is only something else. | 5:35 | |
| There is no reality in modernity outside me. | 5:39 | |
| Therefore, what we call God | 5:44 | |
| is only a projection of something within. | 5:46 | |
| These are the same people who say music | 5:51 | |
| is only a series of sound waves bouncing about. | 5:53 | |
| Art is only a series of scratches upon a canvas | 5:58 | |
| that stimulate certain neurochemical processes in the brain. | 6:02 | |
| Reductionism is the hallmark of the modern mind. | 6:07 | |
| Freud continued in his infamous | 6:13 | |
| The Future of an Illusion, 1927. | 6:15 | |
| There he dismisses "the fairytales of religion | 6:20 | |
| "as only an illusion derived from human wishes. | 6:24 | |
| "The effect of religious thinking | 6:29 | |
| "may be likened to that of a narcotic." | 6:32 | |
| This was what Marx had said earlier when he charged | 6:36 | |
| that religion was the cheap drug of poor people. | 6:41 | |
| Ana-Maria Rizzuto charged in a 1979 book, | 6:47 | |
| The Birth of a Living God, that contemporary psychoanalysis | 6:51 | |
| never had been able to break free of Freud's reductionistic, | 6:56 | |
| vehemently negative account of religion. | 7:01 | |
| Rizzuto noted that the human being | 7:05 | |
| is an inherently inventive, imagining, projecting creature. | 7:09 | |
| Freud was right about that. | 7:14 | |
| In order to live in the world, | 7:17 | |
| we project certain images on our mental screens, | 7:18 | |
| images of the world that are variously accurate | 7:23 | |
| or inaccurate representations of the world. | 7:27 | |
| For instance, a toddler has a fixation with a baby blanket. | 7:30 | |
| Whenever that child feels insecure, | 7:36 | |
| it grabs the blanket and feels better. | 7:38 | |
| Why? | 7:41 | |
| Surely, that blanket is a reminder | 7:43 | |
| of the comforting presence of the parent. | 7:46 | |
| When a toddler holds the blanket, | 7:49 | |
| the toddler feels close to the parent. | 7:51 | |
| This feeling is projection, | 7:53 | |
| but it is not a lie. | 7:58 | |
| It is not a personality sickness. | 8:02 | |
| Rather, the child is busily projecting the comforting | 8:05 | |
| presence of the parent through the object of the blanket. | 8:08 | |
| There really is, somewhere, a parent. | 8:12 | |
| There really is a connection | 8:16 | |
| between the child's projection of the parent and the parent. | 8:18 | |
| The child's feeling of security | 8:21 | |
| when holding that trusted blanket | 8:24 | |
| and a parent who makes the child secure. | 8:26 | |
| And Rizzuto said that such projection | 8:31 | |
| is absolutely essential. | 8:33 | |
| To be human is to busily paint pictures of the world | 8:36 | |
| in order to live in the world. | 8:40 | |
| These mental pictures, though sometimes inadequate, | 8:42 | |
| though often limited by our imagination and our experience, | 8:45 | |
| are nevertheless connected to the real world. | 8:51 | |
| As creatures, we are desperate | 8:56 | |
| to place ourselves in the world, to figure out | 8:58 | |
| from whence we have come and where we are going. | 9:01 | |
| Thus, says Rizzuto, imagination, | 9:05 | |
| illusion, and reality are not contradictory terms. | 9:10 | |
| Even Freud, who took the human psyche | 9:16 | |
| and gave it all these great mythological names | 9:20 | |
| like ego, super ego, libido, was busy forming illusions | 9:23 | |
| which have proved quite serviceable | 9:28 | |
| in mapping the human psyche. | 9:30 | |
| Now we can argue whether or not these projections, | 9:33 | |
| these illusions were helpful, but why should we | 9:36 | |
| call them sick in the way that Freud dismissed religion? | 9:40 | |
| We can't be human without illusion. | 9:47 | |
| We live by various illusions. | 9:50 | |
| Some of them we call fairytales, | 9:53 | |
| others we call science, religion, whatever. | 9:56 | |
| As children, we play with toys and games. | 10:01 | |
| And later, we come to college and we learn to play | 10:04 | |
| with ideas and images and words, and all of that | 10:07 | |
| is our attempt to do business with the world, | 10:11 | |
| to find our way amid the sometimes confusing | 10:14 | |
| cacophony of stimuli that the world gives us. | 10:18 | |
| One of the reason that science works is that | 10:23 | |
| it has been such a successful illusion, projection. | 10:26 | |
| Science makes theories about what is in the world. | 10:33 | |
| It has ways of testing and confirming those theories. | 10:38 | |
| Even when its theories are not | 10:42 | |
| completely empirically confirmed, | 10:45 | |
| they are helpful, truthful ways of naming the world. | 10:48 | |
| And even when the theories of science are confirmed | 10:53 | |
| by scientific methodology, they're still images of what is. | 10:56 | |
| Illusions are not faults, not lies. | 11:04 | |
| Rather, they are projections from the richness | 11:07 | |
| of human experience out into our consciousness, | 11:09 | |
| where we organize and make sense of experience. | 11:13 | |
| Those who make theories about the world assemble information | 11:17 | |
| about the world that enable the rest of us | 11:20 | |
| to make sense of what's going on, to live our lives | 11:23 | |
| with a little less anguish and confusion. | 11:26 | |
| It's not a naive, sick endeavor, but rather a natural | 11:30 | |
| human imaginative attempt to live in the world. | 11:34 | |
| Maybe one reason Freud was so abusive | 11:40 | |
| towards religion was he realized that religion | 11:42 | |
| was one of his chief competitors to answer the question | 11:44 | |
| what's going on out there and in here. | 11:51 | |
| I'm saying in all of this religion is a way of thinking. | 11:57 | |
| Sociologist Max Weber said the first thing religion demands | 12:02 | |
| is sacrifice of your intellect, but he was wrong. | 12:07 | |
| Being religious is intellectual. | 12:13 | |
| Faith is not a way of killing thought. | 12:16 | |
| It's a way of thinking that is more creative | 12:20 | |
| than what the rest of the world calls thinking. | 12:23 | |
| Think of our tendency to project images upon the world | 12:28 | |
| not as arising out of our childish wishes | 12:32 | |
| but arising from the natural human tendency | 12:35 | |
| to think about what's going on. | 12:39 | |
| You might compare our imagination to a kind of movie screen | 12:44 | |
| in which images are projected upon the screen. | 12:49 | |
| For instance, when I tell you, | 12:53 | |
| "You know, this world is a rat race," that's an image. | 12:55 | |
| Or on some rare moment when I say, | 13:01 | |
| "Life is really a bowl of cherries," | 13:04 | |
| well, that's a projection. | 13:07 | |
| I'm not being crazy to engage in such projection. | 13:10 | |
| Rather, my projection needs to be set | 13:14 | |
| in the context of experience and critique, | 13:16 | |
| but it ought not to be dismissed as mere craziness, | 13:20 | |
| as only insanity. | 13:25 | |
| We are individuals who live | 13:29 | |
| in a precarious relationship with the world. | 13:30 | |
| We use language and intellectual constructs | 13:33 | |
| that enable us to move in that world. | 13:36 | |
| But here's a bible question. | 13:41 | |
| What if the world in which we are living | 13:45 | |
| is not only my projection but also God's? | 13:49 | |
| Think about it. | 13:56 | |
| Christians claim that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob | 13:58 | |
| is more than a helpful metaphor. | 14:04 | |
| This God is reality. | 14:09 | |
| This God is the source of reality. | 14:10 | |
| That's why we call this God by the name Creator. | 14:12 | |
| As we've noted, it is typical of modern humanity | 14:19 | |
| to think that we are the only actors, | 14:22 | |
| we are the only speakers, only creators of what he is. | 14:26 | |
| But what if the bible is right in its claim | 14:33 | |
| that God acts, and God speaks. | 14:36 | |
| What if our images of God are not merely my projections | 14:42 | |
| out of my own ego needs, but what if they're gifts, | 14:47 | |
| gifts given by a ceaselessly revealing God | 14:54 | |
| who has this determination to be known. | 14:58 | |
| I've admitted that when I'm thinking, | 15:04 | |
| I'm busily projecting my images upon a screen, | 15:05 | |
| but what if God is also projecting images on that screen? | 15:11 | |
| What if when I say God, I'm not just throwing my projections | 15:18 | |
| and my wishes out into the universe, but what if | 15:24 | |
| I'm also being bombarded by images that I would have | 15:28 | |
| in no way concocted if I had been left to myself? | 15:34 | |
| On Sunday, you get bombarded by these images. | 15:41 | |
| I am the good shepherd. | 15:46 | |
| I am the patient teacher. | 15:49 | |
| I am the crucified savior. | 15:50 | |
| For today, I am bread come down from heaven. | 15:54 | |
| I didn't come up with this stuff myself. | 16:03 | |
| These are images projected on us by the Christian faith. | 16:07 | |
| And as the disciples said with one accord | 16:12 | |
| after hearing Jesus teach in today's Gospel, | 16:15 | |
| a lot of this stuff is hard. | 16:20 | |
| What are we supposed to do with it? | 16:22 | |
| But of course, this stuff is busy doing something with us. | 16:26 | |
| Surely, you have sat in some classroom | 16:31 | |
| or maybe even at church in a sermon | 16:34 | |
| when from out of the blue, | 16:36 | |
| you have had some stunning insight, | 16:38 | |
| some aha experience. | 16:43 | |
| Now normally, as modern people, | 16:46 | |
| we're taught to think of such experiences are self derived. | 16:49 | |
| We say things like, "In that moment, I got it," | 16:54 | |
| or, "In that moment, it all came to me. | 16:59 | |
| "I figured it out." | 17:01 | |
| But what if in these moments, | 17:05 | |
| it's literally a matter that it came to me? | 17:08 | |
| What if on Sunday, your faith is not something | 17:16 | |
| summoned forth within yourself, | 17:19 | |
| some projection of your own yearnings, | 17:21 | |
| but rather, something given to you from the outside, | 17:25 | |
| something that gets you? | 17:31 | |
| In today's Gospel, Jesus says, | 17:35 | |
| "I am the living bread come down from heaven." | 17:40 | |
| See? | 17:45 | |
| Come down from heaven. | 17:47 | |
| He comes to us. | 17:49 | |
| He comes outside of our consciousness from heaven. | 17:51 | |
| His disciples say among themselves, | 17:56 | |
| "This is a hard teaching. | 17:58 | |
| "What are we supposed to do with it?" | 17:59 | |
| And Jesus says, "I told you, this has come down from heaven. | 18:01 | |
| "Your little constricted consciousness | 18:07 | |
| is going to have some trouble with some of this. | 18:09 | |
| "It would be a reach for some of you." | 18:11 | |
| He is bringing something down to us | 18:15 | |
| that we could not have had on our own, | 18:17 | |
| namely the very life of God showing us a God | 18:20 | |
| we could have not projected on our own. | 18:24 | |
| He comes to us before we come to him. | 18:27 | |
| You know, as a pastor, I sometimes noted | 18:32 | |
| when people go through some religious experience, | 18:36 | |
| some conversion and they come to me to tell me about it, | 18:39 | |
| I'm conditioned to say things like, "Well, let's see. | 18:44 | |
| "Were you searching for something? | 18:49 | |
| "Were you looking for something more in your life?" | 18:51 | |
| And they'll say, "Well, I was looking for a date | 18:54 | |
| "for this weekend, but that's all." | 18:56 | |
| I said, "Well, perhaps there's some past experience | 19:00 | |
| "that helps to explain this. | 19:02 | |
| "Or perhaps you're dealing with some grief, | 19:04 | |
| "some past trauma that has occurred to you." | 19:07 | |
| And they said, "No, this just like happened to me. | 19:11 | |
| "It just like came to me." | 19:18 | |
| There is a living God that speaks and acts. | 19:25 | |
| And though we have lots of resources in the modern world | 19:30 | |
| for sealing out the intrusions of this God, | 19:32 | |
| sometimes in God's better moments, God gets to us. | 19:35 | |
| And it's okay to be jolted by that, to feel it's all odd | 19:40 | |
| and strange, to wonder, "What am I supposed to do with that? | 19:44 | |
| "Bread come down from heaven? | 19:47 | |
| "Eat my flesh and live? | 19:48 | |
| "What?" | 19:50 | |
| But don't call it crazy. | 19:52 | |
| Call it a gift. | 19:56 | |
| C.S. Lewis, like many believers, was impressed | 20:00 | |
| by how often the God of the bible is much larger | 20:06 | |
| and more interesting and more weird | 20:11 | |
| than anything we could have thought up on our own. | 20:14 | |
| Maybe he had just read today's Gospel | 20:18 | |
| when he thought this up. | 20:20 | |
| I don't know. | 20:22 | |
| For Lewis, he said the reality of God is often proved | 20:24 | |
| by God's sheer otherness, weirdness, oddness. | 20:30 | |
| Lewis once wrote, "Nothing which at all times | 20:40 | |
| "is agreeable to us has any objective reality. | 20:44 | |
| "It is of the very nature of the real that it should have | 20:50 | |
| "sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, | 20:54 | |
| "that it should insist on being itself and not you. | 21:01 | |
| "Dream furniture is the only kind of furniture | 21:07 | |
| "on which you'd never stub your toes or banged your knee." | 21:12 | |
| Amen. | 21:19 |