Dr. Davidson Loehr       August 31, 2008     

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PRAYER:

            When we are tempted to get carried away with how special we are – so much more special than everyone else – let us remember that the words “humanity” and “humility” have the same root.

            If a self-absorbed arrogance blocks us from growing into our fuller humanity, we may have better luck along the path of a more selfless humility that leaves room for the larger world to find its way into us.

            Wherever we build walls of self-righteousness, we exclude ourselves from participating in a world that is larger and usually more blessed than all our little fossilized certainties.

            One of the most profound ironies of life is the fact that we don’t become bigger by exalting ourselves, but by finding our calling as small parts of a much larger reality.

            Another of life’s delicious ironies is that humility enlarges us more than hubris, embracing differences makes us better people than demanding similarity, just as the willingness to understand another shows that we are more highly evolved than the eagerness to judge them.

            We pray for greater humility, understanding and compassion.  For those are among the spiritual vulnerabilities that truly are more powerful than tight little strengths.

            Our world desperately needs people who can become more fully human.  We pray for the humility to become one of them.  Amen.

SERMON:   To Come Alive

            We gather here to pursue the promises of honest religion: to come alive, to seek truth, and to heal our world.  We’re here in search of that special kind of light that has always been at the center of nearly all religions.  It is the light that lives in words like enlightenment, spiritual illumination, and that halo that medieval painters used to put around the heads of all the saints.  One of religion’s two most enduring questions is “Where are you hurting?”  The other is who and what is that religious light, that religious truth, meant to serve?  And those two questions are deeply intertwined.

            Most of the sermons this fall are planned to help us all find a more informed and more commanding connection to our several religious traditions.  We are religious liberals, our style of worship here has been heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation (whether we’re Christians or not), and some of our most important beliefs – of which you may not even be aware — have been shaped by the best Unitarian thinkers of the early 19^th century.  Our religious heritage has several levels, and I think you will resonate with each of them.  They are all like successive incarnations of the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of liberal and liberating religion, the search for the kind of truth that makes us come more alive, that helps us make ourselves and our world more integrated and authentic.  That’s the gift of life that all religions are meant to offer, and at its best I think liberal religion does it best of all. 

            I’ve always like etymology, the study of the origin of words, because it can show us deeper meanings of ordinary words that we might otherwise overlook.  For instance, the root of the word “liberal” is also the root of words like liberation and liberty, and it means “free.”  In religion, it means free from the constraints of anyone’s orthodoxies, creeds, or salvation schemes that include them but not you.  I’m not knocking salvation.  It comes from Latin words meaning “to save,” but it’s also the root of our word “salve” – it’s about a healthy kind of wholeness.  There is a salvation scheme that transcends all religions, that most of the wisdom literature in the world points to, that is as true and life-giving today as it was 4,000 years ago, in the first incarnation of the liberal spirit that we know of. 

            Today, I want to give you one kind of introduction to honest religion, liberal religion, and what it has involved since its first known appearance at the dawn of history. This is very broad, like flying over a continent pointing out what shows from six miles up.  We’ll revisit some of these themes throughout the fall, both in sermons and in the adult education class our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson will be leading on Monday nights starting September 22^nd.  This is a class where you can read and hear what the influential Unitarian and Universalist thinkers wrote in the early 19^th century.  It’s a little sobering to realize that students preparing for the Unitarian ministry only have to read one essay each by a total of just three Unitarian writers, the most recent one dating to 1841.  That sounds pretty paltry, and in some ways it is.  But Unitarian thinkers have not contributed much of anything to mainstream Christian thought since then, because they have not been interested in mainstream Christian thought since then.  But the new perspectives they brought in a century and a half ago are still profound, still life-giving, and still absolutely essential parts of how almost everyone here understands religion.  This may surprise you, like that Voltaire character who was surprised late in life to learn that all his life he had been speaking prose, but it’s true.  So one theme for this fall will be learning what it means to be both a liberal and a religious liberal. 

            How old is this spirit of honest religion, this spirit of liberal religion?  It’s at least 4,700 years old, which makes it almost prehistoric.  It is found in the oldest story in the world, the story of Gilgamesh, a real-life ruler who lived about 2750 BC, which makes it older than the Bible, older than the earliest Hindu writings, and more than 1500 years older than the Iliad and the Odyssey.  The Gilgamesh story is also the source of the Flood story in the Bible, and the source of the myth about Noah and his ark.  I’ve done a whole sermon on the Gilgamesh epic, and don’t want to repeat it except to show how powerfully it illustrates the spirit of liberal religion, that quest for the kind of light that is at the heart of spiritual illumination and religious enlightenment. 

            Those who wrote the story more than four millennia ago described their age as the “modern” age, which sounds impossible, when they didn’t even have wi-fi or TV dinners.  But writing had just been invented right there in Sumeria, a hundred years earlier, so they saw all the pre-literate people as ancient, and themselves as modern.  They knew writing had changed the world forever, for now history was born, and the past could always be present as never before.  It gave them a kind of synoptic view of history that pre-literate people couldn’t have, so they saw themselves – rightly – as modern.  And as modern people, they had the audacity to ask whether the gods were still useful, and they decided the gods were no longer relevant.  This didn’t frighten or depress them.  Instead, Gilgamesh decided that the purpose of life is right here among us.  It is about living well, loving friends and family, building and contributing things to the future, and being enlarged by the joy and fullness brought through music and the other arts, and the enthusiastic participation in life. 

            In other words, they decided, more than 4700 years ago, that the purpose of life is to seek the kind of truth that makes you come more fully alive, and to participate passionately in the many opportunities and blessings life offers.  Even that long ago, they grew beyond being interested in some tricky way to live on, whether through an afterlife or a reincarnation.  The Buddhists, who wouldn’t appear for another 2200 years, would have said it was the kind of truth that could awaken us from our illusions. 

            That’s the liberal spirit in its earliest known incarnation: the spirit that will question and challenge and shrug off anything that no longer gives us the kind of truth that makes us come more alive.  It is a very courageous spirit.  It is also very disturbing.  Imagine that – simply deciding the gods are no longer useful, and shrugging them off!  I think the Gilgamesh story went farther and more boldly than all of the Bible-based religions that hadn’t even evolved yet.

            When they did evolve, when the ancient Hebrew tribes put together their notion of God by combining Yahweh and the Elohim gods (“Elohim” is plural), and borrowing from other religions, they put together a God from which, in some important ways, we are still suffering.  What I mean by that is that biblical scholars are clear that Yahweh evolved originally from a tribal chief, and has always kept much of the authoritarian character of that ancient tribal chief.  The covenant between that God and his people was based on an earlier Hittite treaty between a ruler and his subjects.  That’s the covenant – which I’ll talk more about next week – that says “I’ll be your ruler and you will be my people.  I’ll protect you if you obey, and punish you if you disobey.”  That’s the attitude that still lets Western believers move way too effortlessly to persecuting or murdering those who believe differently.  It’s been harder to shrug that God off as irrelevant, because its followers may kill you for it — as many martyrs throughout history have discovered the hard and painful way. 

            But this liberal spirit that ranks getting right with truth higher than getting right with God, and coming alive higher than coming to Jesus – this is a dangerous spirit in all times and places.  It believes that “New occasions teach new duties,” and that “Time makes ancient good uncouth.”  Those are the words of 19^th century poet James Russell Lowell, but Gilgamesh walked that talk more than four thousand years before him. 

            When Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation nearly five hundred years ago, reincarnated that ancient liberal spirit, he threw out five of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and said that informed believers trumped uninformed popes.  So you can’t be too surprised to learn that he had to hide out for over a year because the Church had a contract out on him — the same kind of contract that the Ayatollah Khomeini had out on the novelist Salman Rushdie when Khomeini said it was the religious duty of Muslims to kill Rushdie because he had insulted old beliefs.

            The liberal spirit is about freeing the light, liberating the light from the little cages we keep building for it through our creeds, orthodoxies and rituals.  The Unitarian church I served before coming here, in St. Paul, MN, has a wonderful version of this message engraved on the outside of their building, with a picture of birds flying – the bird is a nearly universal symbol of the spirit.  The words were by one of their ministers from half a century ago (Wallace Robbins) and say, “We dare not fence the spirit”.  We dare not fence the spirit!  There is the spirit of liberal religion in six short words. 

            There is a kind of eternal game in religions, between the liberal spirit and the conservative enclosures that keep trying to limit the light to only their own comfort, to fence the boundless energy of the Holy Spirit into the confines of their parochial certainties, the limits of their current orthodoxies and creeds. 

            Now I’m not going to keep singing the praises of that liberal spirit without stopping to attack it – well, if you believe in the liberal spirit, you have to attack it.  Because here we come up against the catch in all of this wonderful and arrogant talk about freedom.  Because when you read it this way, this liberal stuff can sound misleadingly heroic.  It can sound like the point of criticism and inquiry is simply to shatter whatever beliefs people have erected to help them through their lives, as though destroying is a higher calling than creating, as though merely knowing some truths is more important than coming alive.  That’s the seduction that liberals must avoid if they’re to be religious liberals.  For finally, religion isn’t about knowing the right facts; it’s about coming alive.  It isn’t about knowing truths; it’s about living them.  It isn’t about preaching peace; it is, as the Buddhists say, about becoming the peace that we want.  And that is so much harder! 

            The liberal spirit says that if we mouth second-hand beliefs, we’re living someone else’s life, which means there’s nobody left to live our life.  But the spirit of religion says that if our beliefs are only about us, only serve us and our kind of people, then we’re serving something too small to give us life, too partial to be a truth that can help us become more whole, too limited to heal either ourselves or our world. 

            Another way of putting this is to return to the words I used in the first paragraph of this sermon.  All of religion – meaning all of healthy, honest and adequate religion – can be boiled down to two questions.  Yes, this is sort of the Cliff Notes version of Religion 101, but at one level it really is this simple and clear.

            The first question is, “Where are you hurting?”  Half of honest religion is seeking a path to lead us beyond our existential discomfort, our spiritual ennui, the sense that our lives could somehow be “more” and the longing for that “more”.  We don’t need a flashlight for this; we need the kind of light that lives within illumination and enlightenment: that kind of light, that big.  And absolutely nothing may stand in the way of our search for it.  No orthodoxy, no creed, no belligerent beliefs forced on us by those who stopped their own search before they should have, and who are threatened by voices like old Gilgamesh’s that say their precious gods, creeds and rituals are irrelevant and useless.  These are the voices that say time really can make ancient good uncouth.  Not just wrong, but uncouth.  The liberal spirit empowers us to barge through all obstacles in the way of finding the kind of truth that can set us free, make us feel more alive, and help us heal ourselves and our world.

            But the second question – and I think this is the deepest and most easily overlooked question in all of religion – is “Who and what does the Light serve?”  This truth we seek: what must it serve?  To what must it bind us in order to be the kind of truth that can really grant us the kind of wholeness, aliveness and health we seek?  The word “religion” means “reconnection.”  It is about binding us to life-giving truths through a personal covenant – which is the subject of next week’s sermon. 

            But when we move to this second question, we are no longer in the realm of simplistic scientific or rational answers.  Now we are in the realm of poetry, metaphor, and love-talk.  And in love-talk, the answer is that the truth and the light must serve God.  Even more than God.  It must serve Life: all of life.  The kind of truth that can help us come more fully alive originates within the life force — not within religious scriptures or communities — and must return us to that life force to complete the circle, and to bring us home again. 

            If it builds fences at the edges of our own comfortable beliefs, and excludes or damns those who believe differently, than we have found something too small to be worthy of our yearnings.  If it divides the world into the saved and the damned – where we and those who think like us just happen to be among the saved – then we have hitched our wagon to a lie, rather than to a star.  If the light we find starts becoming a little spotlight shining just on our face and telling us we – just we – are special, special, special, then we have been duped and seduced, and need to be awakened from our illusions. 

            There is a little passage in the Christian scriptures that sums this up in just ten words: “Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

            Examine everything carefully – that’s the liberal spirit.  Hold fast to that which is good – that’s the spirit of religion.  And what is good — the light that is truly a light unto the world — is what connects us with truths that make us come alive, that help us heal ourselves and our world.  You can call it what is good, what is of God, or what is sacred.  We can only get at this sort of thing through symbols, metaphors, and love-talk. 

            That kind of light is the most ancient symbol of religion.  We’ll light the light up here on our little ledge every week, as a symbol of that transcendence, illumination and enlightenment, to lift up and liberate the light that is the promise of honest religion. We’ll light a light every week. But it won’t always be the same.  Today it’s just one flame.  Next week there will be three flames, and three banners hanging above them.  Then in a few weeks there will be some more feminine shapes for the candle bases instead of just these X shapes.  At the end of September, there will be a family of five candles of different sizes and shapes, lit by a family of five of our church members.  On the 12^th of October there will be seven lights arranged like a four-foot wide menorah for a service on Atonement in harmony with the Jewish high holy days.  A church member who is a rabbi will blow the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn – you don’t want to miss this – and I’ll try to find seven church members with Jewish backgrounds who would like to come up and light the seven flames.  You get the idea.  We want to liberate the light, to let it point in many directions, not just toward us.  We dare not limit the light or fence the spirit, because in order to serve us well, that light and that spirit must serve all of life.  We are cups of water from the ocean of life; we need to be reconnected with the ocean.  

            There is an aliveness in us that wants us to become whole and fulfilled.  Call it our spirit, or the spirit of life within us, our Buddha-seed or our God-seed.  It’s that spark of the infinite within us, the stardust that resides in every atom of our being.   Sometimes we get frightened, or seduced, or bribed, or numbed by habit and conformity.  We settle for smaller, second-hand identities.  We become merely a man or a woman or an American or a Christian or a Muslim, merely a Unitarian or a University of Texas booster.   You’ll find that distinction between small and large, first- and second-hand identities, preached by almost every good religious thinker in history, including the three 19^th Century Unitarian preachers we’ll talk about later this fall. 

            To some extent, the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus is all of our stories — that’s why myths last for centuries, after all.  He fell in love with his own reflection and was so entranced by it that he could no longer experience the huge world around him.  We so easily go to sleep. 

            That’s why we gather here: to call forth the better angels of our nature, that they may kindly or rudely awaken us and beckon us back to the spirit of life, where we belong, where we can examine everything carefully, and hold fast to what is good.  It’s that challenging combination that makes us both liberal, and religious.  It’s a very good place to be.   

 

Aaron White  August 17, 2008

 

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I went to my culture asking in search for the meaning of love, and this is what I found: The film, Love Story, told me that “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” St. Paul told me that love is “patient” and “kind.” He said that “I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets; I may have all the faith needed to move mountains – but if I have not love, I am nothing.” [1]

The other St. Paul, along with St. John, told me that “All you need is love.” I found in one database 3,419 songs with “love” in the title, and only 124 with “work” in the title. [2]

I was told by others that love looked like diamonds or chocolate. Still, others told me that love looked like sex, or marriage, or friendship. Some say God is love. And yet, if I am to believe what I find in my newspaper’s comic strip section, Love Is apparently what happens between two strange looking naked people. I went to my culture asking in search for the meaning of love, and these are what I got: mixed messages!

It is not unusual for me to find in life that what causes religious reflection for me often comes from very unexpected sources. And this time, the main catalyst came from the television comedy, Scrubs. In one scene, the main character, J.D., is daydreaming about a visit to a friend’s church. I don’t remember too much about the scene, except that in ending the worship service, the very charismatic minister turns to the gathered congregation and says, “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it…

In our modern expression of Unitarian Universalism, I often hear us talk about some things as if they were inevitable – unavoidable. We talk about the inevitability of truth or sometimes the fact of an ever growing complexity and diversity in life. We speak of inevitable knowledge and understanding that comes with experience. But what I don’t often hear described as unavoidable, what I don’t often hear is talk of this type of irresistible love, one that would say, “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

However, running through the core of our tradition, deep within the DNA of our religious heritage, is the understanding that a profound, mature love has the power to break so many barriers. In 1568, the first (and only) Unitarian king in history, John Sigismund of Transylvania, enacted the first recorded law of religious toleration in a nation’s history. While this law included all varieties of the Christian religion only, it was a radical move at the time. He was counseled by his Unitarian court minister, Francis David, who is famously quoted as saying, “We need not think alike to love alike.” But what is it that we love?

Religious thinkers and practitioners, philosophers and scientists alike have been aware for many years that our identities are shaped to a great degree by what it is we hold dear, that we are transformed by what we love. The term “worship” derives its meaning from an older word meaning to give worth, to assign “worth-ship” to something. And at least this form of devotion, this love assigned to people, things, and ideas, seems inevitable in this life.

Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson famously noted, “A person will worship something – have no doubt about that. We may think that our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts – but it will out. That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping, we are becoming.” [3]

The liberal Christian theologian Paul Tillich also noted for him how powerful and, sometimes how dangerous, this type of love can be. For Tillich, “idolatry” simply meant assigning our ultimate love, our “worth-ship,” to things that did not deserve it. In his assertion, everyone, even atheists, make gods out of things that do not deserve the title or the concern.

Our misplaced love can make gods out of money or power, can have us chasing after status or esteem; our highest loyalty and love can easily be paid to the shabby deities of a flag or tribe. Like Emerson and so many before him, he knew that as humans, we will worship something, but that our ultimate love should be directed toward the most ultimate things possible. What/whom is it that we love?

I know that in my own life, it is so easy to misdirect my love – to give ultimate attention to things that don’t ultimately deserve it. I know that I love my wife, my friends, and my family. I love my church, and I devote my love to the emergent, creative process in the universe that I call “God.”

But I am willing to bet that I am not the only person in this room today who has found that it is so tempting to fall in love with other things, too. Maybe it’s my ego – sometimes I fall in love with the idea of being right. I’ve found that it’s tempting to fall in love with possessions, a specific cause, to fall in love with one way of doing things, or even just being liked.

On the other side, it seems like it is also easy for us to fall into the trap of believing that we can tell WHO deserves love in this world and who doesn’t. I know that for me, personally, it is so simple for me to talk about a world in which all people deserve love, but it is a lot harder to live in that world.

I can get revved up on a Sunday morning, convinced that all creation is one big family, and then hours later turn on my television and thing some very unlovely thoughts about people who vote differently, think differently or spend their resources differently. It’s hard to live in that world where we don’t have to think alike “to love alike.”

Sometimes, things get tuned around such that we begin to wonder if we ourselves aren’t less deserving of love than others. I wonder if anyone else here has ever felt like they screwed up so bad that there was little chance of being liked, let alone deserving love? I know deep down that I’m never disconnected from the world, never cut off from what is sacred or an opportunity to grow in wholeness, but sometimes it’s very easy to feel as if I am disconnected.

This is certainly not a new issue in religion. We know that at least one branch of our Unitarian Universalist heritage was forged out of this question of who deserves real love, who deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the world, of the sacred, of God. Although there were certainly believers of Universalism before him, the minister John Murray is often credited as the “Father of American Universalism,” because he founded the first explicitly Universalist congregation in our country.

Murray and our other early Universalist Christian ancestors spread what they called the “doctrine of universal salvation,” the notion that no loving deity could possibly condemn one of its creations to eternal punishment. As you might imagine, in a time of much fire and brimstone preaching, this wasn’t always the easiest position to hold.

After one sermon in which Murray drew a lot of applause, one local orthodox minister, the Rev. Bacon, and some of his supporters left the worship space, “came back with some eggs, and started pelting Murray with them.”[4] For all of you who are fans of corny jokes and puns, you’ll be happy to know that the very witty Murray immediately responded that day, “These are moving arguments, but I must own that I have never been so fully treated to Bacon and eggs before in all my life.” [5]

In our historical heritage, there is a long-standing tradition of people who affirmed that while we are surely defined by what we love, we are equally defined and transformed by what loves us! It seems like a somewhat strange idea for us today. It was this notion of an irresistible love that brought into being one of the most influential figures in our movement that you’ve probably never heard of , or at least don’t hear much about lately.

In 1794, at the age of 22, Hosea Ballou was ordained at the Universalist General Convention without even knowing he was going to be ordained. This young Universalist minister, although he didn’t preach on this often, became Unitarian in his theology, and thus was one of the first true Unitarian-Universalists in our tradition. At the age of 33, Ballou wrote a text that is one of the most influential in his history of our movement. It is called A Treatise on Atonement.

I’m going to do this work a great disservice and boil it down to just a few sentences. Basically, Ballou’s asserted that if our failings are finite, as we are, it makes no sense religiously for an infinite God to bring the infinite power of the universe down to punish one individual, finite being for doing what finite beings do.

He then turned the entire thing around and said that in this divine relationship, it is humans who are the dissatisfied party, not God. For Hosea Ballou, it wasn’t God who needed to be reconciled with human beings, but the other way around. Has anybody else ever felt this way, that it’s not life that has a problem with us, but we who have the problem with life?

Like many before, he asserted that in matters of doctrine, etc, a generously placed love was the safest bet: “Be cautious in any system of divinity,” he warned. “The moment we fancy ourselves infallible, everyone must come to our peculiarities or we cast them away…If we agree in…love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good.”[6]

Ballou said some things in 1805 that are radical in many settings today, including our own, I think. He said, let’s get over quibbling with each other about the literal meaning of religious or philosophical terms. Our religious lives aren’t only about having someone’s anger resolved; they are about growing together in love. Salvation isn’t about getting saved from some eternal punishment, but with falling in love with life, real life.

It makes sense that in the religious tradition of his past, when the teacher Jesus was asked to sum up the most important Jewish laws, he said here were only two things: to love your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. [7]

I wonder if that much has really changed for us. If we are going to commit our deepest love, our devotion and “worth-ship” to something, if we are going to make a god out of something, it had better be something worthy of our attention, and when we do, let us serve that life and all our human and non-human neighbors with every inch of our being.

What is it that you will choose to love? What would it look life for you to be reconciled to life, to your god, or to the world? With so many troubles coming in our direction from life, it’s pretty hard sometimes to imagine that we are the dissatisfied party in the relationship.

We can assert, like so many before us, that there is no group of people damned to hell because of their religious beliefs, yet, in a way, we are “saved” every day. As we read together this morning, we are warmed each day by a sun we did not create, we are fed by food we could plant, but not grow, and we are held in a community of friends and loved ones we did not earn and could never buy. [8]

Whether you are joining us for the first time or one time of many, know that you belong here. We can be a people stuck in our heads, curious for new knowledge, constantly working out the details of an argument or idea, ever in search of new truth. But just as deep within our religious family is the desire to live in a reality where our night language poetic minds could imagine God, or the universe, or reality saying, “I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” We can affirm that all people take part in what is sacred – we need all people to make meaning, and all, without exception, are worthy of love.

How is it that you would respond to such a world? What will you spend your life loving? How is it that you will fall in love with life? This kind of love is not easy; it’s certainly not the kind that can be summed up on one song, or one item, one newspaper page or one verse. It is being reconciled with life.

Those who have loved a parent, a sibling, a child, partner, or friend know that love never means perfection – it has tremendous waves and can be very hard. I think the same will be true of our response to life. So many people in the world, and so many in our community here today, are having a hard time believing that life could be on their side. Let us show one another with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, that while so hard to understand, it can be a life worth loving.

My spiritual friends, hundreds of years ago, John Murray issued this call: “Go out into the highways and byways of America, your new country. Give the people, blanketed with a decaying and crumbling [religion], something of your new vision. You may posses only a small light but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men [and women]. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.” [9]

It was obviously a successful call and a compelling message, as at one time in the 1800s, Universalist churches alone had over 600,000 members – around 4 times what our UU churches have today. It was the 5th largest denomination in the country. In fact, they did such a good job that they almost put themselves out of business! As more and more religious groups affirmed that eternal punishment did not await outsiders, Universalism lost some of its bite.

It seems as is part of our own time is similar to that of Murray. So many people are blanketed in ideas of religion that no longer work, that are crumbling in the face of a new world, and many of them have no idea there is an alternative. Let us not hide it from them. Let us, too give our society something of our new vision, a world in which all beings participate in the sacred, a world in which we value a sincere love over correct doctrine, a world in which we know that when we agree in love, no disagreement can do us lasting harm. In fact, let’s do it so well that we put ourselves out of a job – where this vision of inclusion and tolerance seems commonplace.

So much of who we are is shaped by what we love, and how we respond to a world that gives us life. Who here is ready, in the face of so many imperfections and hardships, to get right again with life? What is it that you will choose to love? May we find together those things that are truly worthy of our devotion and love them with all we have.

What better time than now?

Amen.

 

[1] 1 Corinthians 13:2

[2] http://www.hopstudios.com/nep/unvarnished/five/1730/

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Quoted in Singing the Living Tradition, reading #563.

[4] Charles A. Howe, The Larger Faith (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1993), 5.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 28.

[7] Mark 12:29-31

[8] Singing the Living Tradition, reading #515

[9] The Larger Faith, 9.

 

Aaron White   August 10, 2008

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A few years ago I heard the story of a woman named Rue.  Rue had recently decided to purchase a home in what was becoming the very expensive location of Sag Harbor, New York.  When she thought her luck was exhausted, she found what could be described as the deal of a lifetime.  But there was a catch.  The home Rue was looking to purchase was listed under two different prices.  The more expensive price for the home included as she expected “a house, a shed, and a little garden.” The less expensive price for the home ($110,000 less expensive) included “a house, a shed, a little garden, and Ned.”[1] 

 Ned was the former owner of the home, an older man who was growing quite ill.  In exchange for the drastic reduction in price, Ned could live in his larger downstairs portion of the home for his remaining days, while Rue would inhabit the two rooms upstairs.  Jokingly, Rue refers to him as the “man who came with the house.”[2]

 When Rue first bought the house, it seemed no problem to her.  She didn’t take up too much space, was single, and Ned would surely not be around for too long.  Within the year, though, she had “[acquired] a puppy, a husband, and a baby.”[3]  And Ned was still very present.  Now she feels somewhat bad about even talking about the situation, as everyone involved knows, a significant part of her is waiting for Ned to die. “I never expected to live that long,” said Ned.  “I’m aware that the other side can’t be thrilled that I’m still here.”[4]

 I can’t help but think that a lot of us share an experience similar to that of Rue.  Here is a woman, cramped in her own home, feeling as if something drastic needs to change before she can start really living.  How many of us here have felt, or are feeling, the same way?  So many of us spend our time waiting for something to be different - for something to be over - waiting for something to leave us before we really start to live.

 I figure I’ll just throw out a few of the things I know I have thought or said in my life and see if they resonate with anybody else here: “Just after this project is over, then I’ll start really spending time with my partner again – I’ll be in better touch with my family when this crazy month winds down - I’ll have time to be a good person again when this to-do list is a little smaller - I’m just too busy to have a spiritual practice.”  And yet I am somehow consistently surprised that the to-do list is never empty, there’s another project after the one I finish, and my spiritual practice doesn’t practice itself.  Anyone else?  I once heard a Christian monk say that he prayed every day for one hour, and if he was going to have an especially busy day, we would pray for two hours.  I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely not there yet!

 The rhetoric we hear so often about our modern lives is that we are fast-paced, over-booked and constantly busy.  But busy doing what?

 I refer to a line by the Quaker author, Parker Palmer, quite often because it resonates with me so much.  He says there are “moments when it is clear—if I have eyes to see—that the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.”[5]

 There is often so much life that wants to live in me, and instead of living it, I’m waiting for Ned to die and leave the house before I get started!  I can only speak for myself, of course, but so often I feel like some part of who I am needs to be different or be gone before I can start living like I want to live.  How often are we waiting for that perfect moment in life or that perfect version of ourselves to be present before we start living like we want to live? 

 The truth in my experience, though, is that there is no perfect moment in the future to start really living, that no flawless version of me is ever going to show up that can take risks for me – Ned is never going to leave, and if he does, he’ll be replaced by someone or something very similar.  If we wait for that “perfect” moment, it will be too late.

 Theologically, most of us as UU’s assert that heaven and hell are not places but states of mind that we experience here on this earth.  We talk about believing in “life before death.”  But how many of us miss it?  Often, it is not the external busyness of life that has me waiting to live, but the busyness of my mind.  It is so easy to get caught up in remembering times in the past when I took a risk and failed, or work out the most detailed scenarios of all the things that go could go wrong in the future. 

The Buddhists refer to this aspect of our being as our “monkey mind,” and scientists would identify the part of our brain that does this as our neo-mammalian brain.  We can be very thankful that our ancestors millions of years ago developed it – it is exactly what helped them to make sense out of patterns and make choices between options.  But that doesn’t means it is always easy to live with it now.

 We even do this as a religious community.  I’ve heard it said that we can’t make the difference of a “real” religious community until we’re bigger than we are, or that we need to all agree on some more things before we get started making communities of justice.  I hear all the time that people want their church to grow, but not to look different than it is right now.  We can easily spend much of our time as a people worrying about what a newer future would look like with us as a vital voice in our society, but if we wait for that to happen on its own, we will have missed the opportunity of a lifetime.        

 We spend so much of our lives waiting to live, so much of our lives worrying about the past or the future.  But as we know, we have such a brief time to live the life that wants to live in us.

 It doesn’t take much to remind us of our finitude, our mortality: a close call in an accident, a scary diagnosis, the loss of a friend or family member.  But in the midst of this reality, it is sometimes hard to really believe that one day we will not exist!

 One of my favorites musical groups, Spiritualized, summed this notion up in a song, from which I got the title of today’s sermon.  Here are a few lines from the song: 

 ”Though my body gets tired, my mind does it no favors at all

And there’s so little time, to do something, something, anything more
And there’s no use in crying about the damage that you’ve done inside
And there’s so little time, to do something, something, anything more
…Don’t cry, baby, cry – as long as you and I 
Do more than just survive, don’t cry, [we'll] have a real good life
…There’s so little time, so do something, something, anything more.”[6]

 It brings me some comfort to know that we’re certainly not the first people in history to live with this tension.  We may feel busier than ever - our bookstores are filled with texts helping people to live in the present moment, dealing with worry and anxiety, but this has been the human condition for a long, long time.

Spiritual teachers have been addressing this concern for millennia.  In the language of the early Christian writings, Jesus reminded those around him that the Kingdom of God was present here and now, not somewhere else!  Just as now, this teacher knew that much of our human life is consumed waiting and worrying about our problems around food, safety, money, status, etc.  It is almost as if the authors of this text could have been writing today.  In the book of Matthew, the text has Jesus saying, “Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing…Can all your worries add one day to your life?”[7]  He charged those around him to live their lives now.  Verse 34 of the same book reads, “So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.”[8]   

 An author of one of the Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures says something I feel all the time, just in a little different language.  He writes in Psalm 35, “Oh Lord, you know all about this, Do not stay silent. Do not abandon me now…Rise to my defense…take up my case…Then I will proclaim your justice, and I will praise you all day long.”[9]

 And yet here we are again: I’ll be happy and grateful for life, just after these good things happen to me.  I know I feel this urge to live a life of peace and justice within me - I just need to get all my affairs in order first. There’s so much that could go wrong!  I just need enough money to be secure first, have the right job first.  Once that happens, I’ll definitely start living the life that wants to live in me.

 This issue has not gone unnoticed in our own historical tradition of Unitarian Universalism.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay titled, Prudence, noted this same problem in his own time.  “Life wastes itself while preparing to live,” he says, “…How much of human life is lost in waiting?”[10]

 In a letter to a friend, Henry David Thoreau also noticed that people seemed too busy to live. He writes, “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”[11]

My friends, what is it that you are busy about, and what is it that you are waiting for?  What great dream of yours, what type of life and love have you wanted to live that you’re waiting on?  There is so little time to do something, anything more.

 For me, this challenge is not an expression of only one side of liberal religion, that side which continually calls for freedom of conscience and personal expression.  This is a vital part, but only one part.  It is not the whole story.  A true understanding of our finitude calls me to serve life and others as only I can while I am here.  I owe it to the life that I affect to live more nobly and lovingly in the time that I have.  There is no one exactly like you, never has been, and never will be again.

 Here’s one way of putting the length of our time on earth in perspective.  If the entire history of the Universe was compressed into 100 years, every day would equal 400,000 years, and each minute would be 250 years long. 

 In this cosmic timeline, all hydrogen in the universe is created on day two.  Our solar system comes into existence in year 67.  On this timescale, the dinosaurs died out in May of year 99, and we Homo Sapiens appear on December 31st of the 99th year.  Rev. Michael Dowd had this to say about the timeline, “If we show up on the last day of a 100 year process, maybe it’s possible that the whole thing wasn’t meant for us.”[12] 

 We are so big and yet so small at the same time.  Some of this information is very humbling for me. I think, “You mean to tell me my ego is not the most important thing in the universe? But I spend so much time defending it!”  This perspective also helps me when I think about my screw-ups.  In cosmic time, they are pretty small. Some of this information lets me off the hook a bit for the mistake that I thought was the end of the world, and especially for that load of laundry that went undone last week and caused me so much stress.  It just puts things in perspective.

 This doesn’t mean, though, that each of us does not matter.  We know that what we do lives on, that we make a make upon life itself, each of us affects lives.  All of us in this room share a common ancestor somewhere way back.  I’m able to speak here today because millions of years ago, some individual primate had the gumption to move out of the way of that falling branch, or thought it was better to gather in community to face an opponent.  So don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference!  Who knows what life will live because of you?

My point here is this, we have so little time, yet so much is possible.  In his book, Canticle to the Cosmos, the physicist, Brian Swimme says, “Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera!”[13]   Friends, in the last 2 minutes of this cosmic time-line I described, we have experienced the coming into being of harnessed electricity, social democracies, the protestant reformation, airplanes, the internet, vaccines, Beethoven, and of course, the IPod.  What will the next minute look like because you were alive? 

 We’re not very big in cosmic time, but we know that in this history of the Universe, shared common interest has driven complexity and cooperation among elements and living things.  When there was crisis, it was the cells that joined together, the animals that cooperated, the societies that served one another, who survived to live life.  We UU’s affirm that reality is interdependent, that no part of existence exists separate from another – that we can’t easily draw boundaries around one part of reality and call it sacred and that profane.  As Emerson noted in The Over-Soul:

 ”…there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where [a human], the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away…”[14]

 We know that what we do makes a difference.  If we do share a common home and a common good, then what your life has to offer this process can be given by no one but you.  It does not always have to be grand or seemingly ground breaking, just the life that wants to live in you.  What are you waiting for?

 It is sometimes hard for me to even think in these massive cosmic terms, how my life fits into the history of the universe.  It’s a little overwhelming to tell you the truth.  So it sometimes helps me to scale it down a bit. 

 How many more times will your friends smile because you have lived?  Who will learn something they did not know because you were there to teach them?  What stranger might be convinced that people can be good because of your small acts of kindness?  What song, poem, painting, family, garden, church, community, would not exist in the same way without you?  And what great piece of life have you yet to express? 

 What are you busy about, and what is it that you are waiting for?  What is keeping you from living, as Christians might say, as if the Kingdom of God really is present here on earth, or as our Buddhist friends might say, what is it that keeps you from living in the only moment that is, this present moment?

 Friends, in this life, we have so little time.  So much of what we focus on in our anxieties of the past or future – so many of our worries - bind us to imperfections or mistakes that remain so small in perspective.  Yet at the same time, we are able to change lives; we are able to affect the course of life itself.   

 It is up to us to offer what we can while we are here.  It will be made up of the common elements of life: One more conversation, one more smile, one more song, one more act or forgiveness, of kindness, one more act of justice.

 May we realize that there will be no more perfect moment that now to begin living the life that wants to live in us.  May we join together, finding the strength of community and friends to build the life we wish to see on earth.  As the song says, “there’s so little time, so do something…anything more.’

 What better time than now?  

Amen.

 

 

[1] This American Life, “It’s Never Over.” Produced by Alex Blumberg (Chicago: Chicago Public Radio, June 23,2006)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 2.

[6] Jason Pierce, “Anything More.” Spiritualized. From the album Let it Come Down. BMG, 2001. Audio CD

[7] Matthew 6: 25-27

[8] Matthew 6:34

[9] Psalm 35:22-28 (Paraphrased)

[10] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Prudence -
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st_Series_07_Prudence.htm

 

[11] Henry David Thoreau, Personal Letter to Harrison Blake. November 16, 1857.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau

 

[12] Michael Dowd, Beyond Sustainability: A Hopeful, Inspiring Vision of the Next 250 Years, online video broadcast -
http://www.wie.org/unbound/media.asp?id=57  (Accessed August 6, 2008). 

[13] Brian Swimme, Canticle to the Cosmos, quoted in Michael Dowd, Thank God for Evolution (Tulsa: Council Oaks Books, 2007), 121.

[14] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul -
http://www.rwe.org/works/Essays-1st_Series_09_The_Over-Soul.htm

 

Aaron White   August 3, 2008

 

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