No Sticks, No Carrots, Just Love.
We are getting close to Christmas and I’m here to minister about Jesus… Now some of you probably felt the impulse click out of this article when I wrote that, and some of you might have had the opposite reaction, feeling like you just don’t get enough Jesus in your life these days. If you think we struggle with the “God”, well it pales in comparison to the struggles we have about “Jesus”.
So, in honor of his birthday — I’m not going to do some of the things I’ve seen done — I’m not going to reclaim the pagan roots of the winter solstice and I’m not going to retell the Biblical Christmas story and pluck some allegorical or mythical lessons from the tale that are disconnected from claims of divinity or virgin birth. What I am going to attempt is a serious reckoning with the core prophetic teaching of Jesus — a reckoning that honors him as a human being who understood the transformative power of love and tried to teach us about it.
Here is one thing, a provocative thing, that I like to say about Jesus. Jesus’ teachings were so radical, so profound that we’ve spent over 2,000 years turning him into a deity and an idol in order to avoid practicing what he preached. And that’s what I think we’ve done in Western Christian civilization, we turned a prophet who was one of us into a god, a manifestation of God that we CAN’T be, and we did that because we simply couldn’t imagine or accept that we could live up to the kind of transformative love he practiced. So, we separated ourselves from him, we moved him up to Heaven… made him into an idol, one whose name we can intone as a secret password, to some the only password, that gives us a ticket to the good version of the afterlife. Do you see what a distraction that is? He tried to tell us how we could love one another and create heaven right here among us. We repaid that gift by misunderstanding him so poorly that we built a whole new religion around him that frames the ‘here and now’ as a means to an end. Our life — literally reframed as a test where we gain access to heaven if we pass or we are sent to hell for eternal damnation if we fail. Now, that reading doesn’t sound like transformative love to me, but we’ll come back to that.
So, I’ve walked an odd path to this article today — I’d like to share some of that path with you, I hope you find some value in the walk. First, I think that you should know that I was born again in an evangelical Christian church, that I spoke in tongues and performed faith healings and received the gift of prophecy. Second, you should know that a little bit later in life I was an equally fervent atheist. The path that brings me to this writing began when two things happened: first — I realized that I was just as dissatisfied with proselytizing atheism as I had been with proselytizing Christianity, second — I realized that there were true and worthy aspects of each of those experiences, aspects that I had neglected and that I needed to reintegrate into my life.
One thing that happens when we reclaim Jesus as a human prophet — a child of God, sure, just not MORE a child of God than you, or than me. Not a ‘different kind’ of ‘child of God’… One thing that happens when we do that, is that it begs an important question about prophecy — if Jesus was A prophet, not THE prophet — then he isn’t as alone, isn’t as singular, as we’ve made him out to be. It begs the question whether there are other prophets, in other guises, with other missions — other lessons to teach us, out there… right now, doing the good work.
I’m going to draw, this morning, on the works of two others whom I find both prophetic and deeply aligned with Jesus’ work on the transformative power of love. The first is Marshall Rosenberg the founder of nonviolent communication. Now Marshall, like Jesus, begins with a deep cultural criticism. He says that our culture teaches what he calls Jackal consciousness. A jackal’s habitual way of speaking and thinking is: judging, criticizing, analyzing, moralizing, and accusing. (Sound familiar?) Jackal communication makes demands and seeks to blame, it doesn’t leave space for reparation, it just wants to be RIGHT! Now Giraffes represent the other end of the spectrum and are so named because the giraffe is the land animal with the largest heart. Giraffe consciousness attends to basic needs, yours and others. When a giraffe hears, they don’t pay too much attention to the words, they pay attention to the basic human needs underneath those words. For example, a jackal accusation “You never pay attention to me.” would be heard by a giraffe as “I have a need for attention that isn’t being met right now.” And one of the first, and most basic, strategies that a giraffe would use is to mirror that need back, “What I hear you saying is that your need for attention isn’t being met.” Where jackals try to get their needs met instrumentally — often accidentally sabotaging their own attempts (since no one likes being manipulated) — giraffes work at getting clear about their own needs and at hearing the needs of others, they center a relational approach to mutual needs satisfaction: looking for ways that everyone can get their needs met. This begins by getting clear about their own needs and the needs of others, from there finding peaceful solutions is often relatively straightforward.
Now, let’s go back to our friend Jesus. Jesus saw a world full of jackals — even the priests of the temple: blaming, accusing, moralizing, judging… threatening people with stoning and violence for breaking the laws. He saw how ineffective this was, how toxic it was, he saw that things could be different if we learned how to show up as giraffes instead of jackals… he saw that treating each other instrumentally got us nowhere except at each others throats, he saw that building relationships of trust and understanding and love was a way out of the madness… we were, and for the most part still are, deaf as stones…
The second person I want to talk about is Alfie Kohn who is best known for his work on unconditional parenting and education, but whose broader work on the efficacy of rewards and punishment is most relevant to our struggle this morning. Alfie engaged in a meta-analysis of all the research we’d done on punishment and rewards where we had control groups who were neither punished or rewarded, and where we did medium to long-term evaluation, not just one-time or short duration. The short version: rewards and punishments both produce transient and unsustained increases in the quantity of work or compliance, and — when measured — always at the expense of quality and engagement. He published those results in the book Punished by Rewards in 1993. When the 25th anniversary edition of the book was released in 2018, he said, in the afterward, that he still hadn’t seen a single controlled study that indicated that systems of punishment or incentives produced sustainable positive impacts on either the quantity or the quality of work. Much like Jesus and Marshall Rosenberg — more time has been spent ignoring his work than figuring out what it might mean for how we live. What is surprising to most about the work is that reward systems — gold stars, financial incentive plans, you name it — they don’t fare any better in the testing than punishment systems… Even verbal rewards like praise don’t produce statistically significant positive results — although many studies measure significant long-term negative effects. Here’s one example: programs aimed at children that issue prizes for reading have been shown to have a statistically significant negative long-term impact on students’ interest in reading. Not only that, students pick books based on page-counts and font size, and they retain less of what they read than children asked to read the same books without a prize. There have been similar studies on chimpanzees and other primates, they show that the promise of rewards — food for example — either has no impact on performance, for easy or moderately difficult tasks, or is likely to diminish task performance for difficult or high cognitive load tasks. Essentially, we’re wired to do problem solving for fun — and putting a reward between us and our puzzle is, at best, an insignificant distraction and, at worst, a detrimental one.
What does this mean? — I think it means two important things:
- We don’t like to be manipulated. (&)
- We aren’t stupid.
Let me digress for a moment about Alfie Kohn’s work — he says that there are two questions that we grapple with when it comes to dealing with other people, especially when we are parenting or managing. The first is easy — “What do I want you to do?” This question, by itself, leads to the kinds of instrumentalist, reward and punish methods we’ve been talking about. But he challenges us to think a bit more deeply, if we’re honest we also care about WHY we want the other person to do it — “I want my son to do his math homework because I want him to be curious and interested in math.” “I want him to clean his room because I want him to have good habits of cleanliness and responsibility.” In other words, we care not only about things getting done, but we care about why they get done. Now, in our stressful and time-constrained lives, we have been trained to stop caring after question 1 — and this is where we break relationship, where we break trust, with both our children and our coworkers, with our partners and our families. When we’re too busy to care about why, we walk away from relationship to a shallow place called compliance — and we manipulate, and we feel manipulated, and we break relationship… okay, back to our thread…
We know when we’re being bribed or threatened. And as a general rule, we don’t like it… we find it condescending and manipulative. So what’s the alternative,? It won’t surprise you that it echoes the teachings of Jesus and Marshall Rosenberg. The alternative is genuine and authentic relationship. Trust is highly motivating. Trust does not get read as manipulation, it gets read as right-relationship. We like solving problems for their own sake. We like doing good for its own sake. We like helping other people for its own sake. I know that there are some pretty pervasive and cynical narratives out there trying to convince you that this couldn’t possibly be the case — they want you to believe that everyone else out there is this close to being all-out evil and killing you in your sleep just to steal your fillings. And most of us have been hurt, most of us have hurt others, sometimes in our darker moments it feels plausible that we might, ourselves, be evil… that we might be so broken we shouldn’t be trusted. Trust is an aspect of love that can heal us. Trust puts the unconditional back into the Love we need.
I hope you’ll pardon a weird aside — I’m gonna give you ministerial treatment of cryptocurrency — How many of y’all are confused by cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, all of that block-chain stuff? Yeah, I hear that. Well part of my earlier career was translating technical stuff into understandable language. So here it goes with cryptocurrency. First, let’s baseline with traditional paper currency: to make a dollar bill it costs an estimated 2.8 cents in energy and materials. Now, as you may remember from Econ 101 and American History, that dollar is fiat money — it isn’t tied to gold or anything else, it is tied only to your trust in the US government. Now, in its simplest form, what is cryptocurrency? It is money created for a world without trust. It is money that is legitimized, not through relationship and trust, but by instrumental rationality combined with energy-intensive algorithmic computing. So, what does it actually cost to replace trust with energy?
[The Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index] (It is) estimated that one bitcoin transaction takes 1,449 kWh to complete, or the equivalent of approximately 50 days of power for the average US household.
So, at average US energy prices, that comes out to $173. So, if we have a system of trust — we can spend 2.8 cents and get functional, reusable currency. If we have no trust, it costs us $173 per transaction. That’s a 620,000% increase, and that’s just for the first use. That’s what a world without trust looks like. That’s what it costs.
Alright, so back to our main thread — Jesus, like Alfie Kohn, was a proponent of unconditional love, a proponent of solving problems through relationship and trust… Now, let’s look at the religion they built about Jesus and ask if it has been true to this teaching?
I think y’all can see where this is going, right?
What is Heaven if not the ultimate incentive plan?
What is Hell if not the ultimate threat of punishment?
Is it any wonder that people are sick and tired of being bullied and manipulated by those who are promising to help them feel more connected?
Is it any wonder that ‘spiritual but not religious’ is the fastest growing religious category in the United States?
Now, I know that some of us are Universalists, are of the ‘no hell’ persuasion — and we’re rightly proud of that. But I have to ask. Have we done enough? Have we really taken the message of unconditional love to heart, or have we settled for softer versions of carrots and sticks?
Here’s what Alfie Kohn’s research suggests about the likely impact of Heaven and Hell on spirituality — an emphasis on Heaven as reward or Hell as punishment is likely to have several effects:
- People will emphasize easy compliance over deepening spiritual practice — for example, get drunk on Friday and Saturday then repent or confess on Sunday, instead of seeking therapy or doing the work of a 12 step program to find some healing from the addiction and its causes.
- People will lose long-term interest in religion. To the extent that people feel judged and manipulated, they will continue to find their intrinsic interest in spiritual and religious issues decreasing over time. The more life is framed as a test, or worse, a competition for the honor of heaven or the defeat of hell, the worse this will be.
- People will be unable to have deep, authentic, spiritually-centered relationships with their churches and each other. When the core practice is one of judgment, not of unconditional love, then that practice will eat away at the trust that is necessary for building loving and compassionate communities.
Alright, let’s turn back to Marshall Rosenberg for a minute. He tells a story in his book about a meeting with warring tribes in Nigeria — 12 chiefs were from Islamic tribes and 12 were from Christian tribes. Of course, they started off arguing in the Jackal style “You are murderers!” “You are trying to control us!” Marshall listened and began to translate, “It seems like you have a need for security that isn’t being met?” “It seems like you have a need for self-determination that isn’t being met?” …after a few hours of this, one of the chiefs, who had remained silent up until this moment, said, “Marshall, if we learn to communicate like this, we won’t have to kill each other anymore.”
Well Amen. Praise Jesus. & Hallelujah
“If we learn to communicate like this, we won’t have to kill each other anymore.”
I know it’s not a line from the Bible — but it IS what Jesus was trying to teach us.
If we learn to communicate like this.
If we learn to love like this.
If we learn to trust like this.
We won’t need to kill each other.
We won’t need to hurt each other.
We won’t need to live in fear.
Amen & Blessed Be.
A closing thought:
There were more babies born during the pandemic than there were people alive on the Earth during Jesus’ life… May we keep our eyes and ears, hearts and minds, institutions and spirits open to the new prophets born among us… And if we really want to honor Jesus, maybe we can find a way to put our new prophets in the spotlight and not in the crosshairs.
- Adapted from a sermon delivered at San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Georgetown, Texas on December 17, 2023.
- For a video version see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKACTpytx74
