a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 20th, 2005
I want you to know that at the top of the pad of paper that I use each week to organize my thoughts, before sitting down on Saturday to write them out word for word, was the note “Find a better joke.” I guess last week’s offering (originally written by Carlislian Stephen Wright) about “breakfast anytime” being “French Toast in the Renaissance” was just a little too obscure, so this week I was prepared to spend several hours finding something better. And then yesterday morning I opened my e-mail and there was this, from Beliefnet’s Joke of the Day.
Three children were talking about their religions. "I'm a Catholic," said one, "And our symbol is the crucifix." "I'm Jewish," said the second, "And our symbol is the Star of David." The third child said, "I'm a Unitarian Universalist and our symbol is a candle in a cocktail glass!"
We’re about halfway through now this informal series I’ve been preaching this fall about “The Purpose Driven Unitarian.” This all started out, you may recall, when I realized that the five pillars around which I have built my ministry for the past fifteen years or so: Worship, Education, Fellowship, Community Outreach and Pastoral Care, were virtually identical to the five purposes described by megachurch pastor Rick Warren in his best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life: Worship, Fellowship, Discipleship, Ministry and Evangelism. And so I thought it might be kind of fun for me to explore how my ideas about these important spiritual topics might be a little different from his, and also where they overlapped. So two weeks ago I spoke on the topic of Worship, which is not only a celebration of the Creative Power which gives us life, but also an expression of our gratitude for that gift, which we demonstrate through our devotion to the things “that make God smile,” and the sacrifices we willingly make in order to achieve a higher purpose. And then last Sunday I spoke about the idea of Vocation, or “calling,” and how we might each discern our unique spiritual gifts for service by listening to our Hearts, applying our Abilities, empowering our Personalities, and employing our life Experience in order “to be of use” to our neighbors and the Greater Good. And on future Sundays, as we move on into the holidays, I intend to talk about Education, and the process of “self-culture” by which Unitarians and Universalists have traditionally continued to grow and improve ourselves spiritually; and also Outreach, or the ongoing commitment to affirming and sharing our free religious faith in ways that transform the world.
But today we are at the heart of the matter. Today’s topic is community, or in Greek koinonia -- a word whose core meaning is “shared” or “common,” and which is often translated into English as “fellowship” or “communion.” Community is about the common life we share with one another, our shared interest in a common whole, the communion we enjoy in fellowship with one another, within our communities of faith. It’s about our shared goals and values, our common dreams and aspirations. The experience of becoming part of an authentic community is one of the most commonly shared motivations for joining and attending a religious organization -- and this is true regardless of denomination, and across the entire spectrum of theological belief. Within Unitarian Universalism we sometimes describe our congregations as “communities of memory and hope,” shaped by covenants of mutual trust and support. But no matter how we may choose to frame the subject, a sense of community truly is at the heart of the matter. What do we commonly share, and with whom do we commonly share it? Answer these questions, and you will know in which community (or communities) you belong, and from which you are excluded.
The New Testament uses several other metaphors to describe what it means to be part of a community of believers. And the first of these is the word “church” itself, which in Greek is ecclesia -- those who have been “called out.” The Apostles Creed uses the phrases “holy catholic church” (hagian katholiken ecclesian) and “communion of saints” (hagion koinonian) to describe two of the key beliefs of second century Christianity. The Greek word hagios means literally something that is consecrated or set aside, while the word “catholic” (with a small “c”) literally means something that is liberal, universal, and all-inclusive (again, from the Greek words kata and holos: “completely whole”). Thus, one of the earliest understandings of Church in the Christian tradition was an all-inclusive community of those who had been called out and set aside to enjoy fellowship with one another. The Latin version is even more striking. To be called is to have a Vocation. To be set aside is to be Sanctified. And fellowship -- koinonia -- is Communion, which of course is how all communal communistic communities commonly communicate.
A second, and probably even earlier New Testament metaphor for the church is that of “the Body of Christ” with its “many members.” Those of you who have recently been to an Easter Service here at FRS will probably be familiar with this notion -- it is the community of the faithful who “stand again” in the place of their crucified teacher who comprise “the risen body of Christ.” And although the early church quickly moved away from this metaphorical understanding of the resurrection to a more literal teaching about the resurrection of the flesh, it is unquestionably a central image in the original letters of Paul, and remains a compelling understanding of community today: a diverse gathering of individuals who embody a shared heritage of instruction along with common traditions, goals, and values.
I know that on many occasions I’ve described one of the responsibilities of ministry as that of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” It’s a cute little maxim, with its clever verbal parallelism, but in many ways it is also deceptively superficial in its cleverness. Ministers lead communities of faith, and they lead them through Service, by both precept and example. Ministers are expected to practice what they preach, and to be an inspiration to others, and of course it’s understood that we never screw up or make mistakes. Ministers attempt to embody the ministry of the church -- not so that the rest of the community can thereby be excused from their responsibility to serve, but rather so that they might be guided in it. And these responsibilities for shared ministry basically fall into two areas.
The first responsibility is to hold people safe. To let them know, by our physical presence if nothing else, that there are other people in the world who care for them, and are concerned about them, even at those times when they may feel most alone. We can’t always protect the ones we love from every contingency of human existence. People suffer, and feel pain; they experience failure and frustration and loss...but as long as there is a compassionate community of the faithful who are willing to share those burdens by making them common ones, life’s afflictions become a little easier to endure.
And the second responsibility is to hold people accountable: to help them see (and perhaps at times even to compel them to see) that the decisions we make and the actions we take all have consequences, which not only effect our own lives, but also the lives of others, in ways we can’t always even begin to imagine or anticipate. Life is a series of choices, and each decision we make typically cuts off the opportunity to make some other decision somewhere down the line. Not always, of course. Sometimes we recognize our mistakes in time; sometimes life offers us “do overs.” Some people simply blunder through life never worrying about the consequences of their behaviors (and typically leaving a broad trail of wreckage behind them), while others are so concerned about the possible consequences of their decisions that they become paralyzed, and incapable of taking any action at all. Holding people accountable (and perhaps more imporantly, our own willingness to be accountable to other people) is about both discouraging other members of the community from making bad choices, and encouraging them to act on the good ones.
These basic lessons of safety and accountability are nothing more than what any half-way decent parent would attempt to teach their own children. We want our young people to know that they are loved, and we want them to understand that their choices have consequences for good or ill. And this brings me to a third metaphor for what it means to be part of a religious community, which is the understanding that we are all children of God, and brothers and sisters to one another. The experience of being part of a family is our earliest experience of community, and in many ways we never really get over it. Likewise, the time we spend with our children is precious and irreplaceable -- and once it is gone, we will never get it back again. And this is why it is so important that, rather than allowing church to conflict with your family activities, you need allow church to BECOME a family activity. Church needs to be something that we all do together, so that our children can learn from our example that they are safe, that they are loved, that their decisions have consequences, and that they should always try to choose the path in life that leads them to the good: to joy, to happiness, to real and meaningful accomplishment, rather than that other path that leads disappointment and suffering and harm.
Creating a healthy community, and sharing in its common life, requires several important personal qualities. It requires Commitment -- a willingness to make the community a priority in our lives, and to give our best selves to it. It requires Honesty: the commitment to being truthful with one another, and to communicating openly and frankly. It also requires Humility: the recognition that none of us are perfect, or more important than those around us, and a conscious decision to be patient, to be understanding, to be forgiving of our natural human foibles as we all attempt to understand one another and find our common way. Healthy community requires Civility, or at least a certain degree of Common Courtesy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we all need to insist on a lot of formality; rather it means respecting the dignity and integrity of everyone we meet, and recognizing that the values we share in common are much stronger than the disagreements that push us apart. Healthy community insists upon high levels of Trust, and Trustworthiness -- an attitude which is ready to believe the best about other people, and which respects privacy and confidentiality while resisting the temptation to gossip. Finally, healthy community requires high levels of Participation, so that being fully present for one another becomes a matter of habit rather than an act of will. The more time we spend with together, the more of ourselves we are willing to invest in our relationships with one another, the better we will get to know each other, and our community will be better and stronger for the experience.
Of course, even the best communities sometimes experience conflict. And this is where I find Rick Warren’s insights especially fascinating. (I suspect that with a congregation of more than ten thousand members, he’s had a fair amount of experience in these matters). According to the Sermon on the Mount, Peacemakers are blessed as the Children of God. Yet peacemaking is not about avoiding conflict, or running from it or pretending it doesn’t exist. Rather, peacemaking grows out of the recognition that relationships are always worth restoring, especially if we value being part of God’s family. Here are Rick Warren’s seven biblically-based steps for restoring conflicted relationships.
1) Talk to God before talking to the person. “Tell God your frustrations. Cry out to him. He’s never surprised or upset by your anger, hurt, insecurity, or any other emotions. So tell him exactly how you feel. Most conflict is rooted in unmet needs. Some of these needs can only be met by God. When you expect anyone -- a friend, spouse, boss, or family member -- to meet a need that only God can fulfill, you are setting yourself up for disappointment and bitterness....”
2) Always take the initiative. “It doesn’t matter whether you are the offender or the offended: God expects you to make the first move. Don’t wait for the other party. Go to them first....Delay only deepens resentment and makes matters worse. In conflict, time heals nothing; it causes hurts to fester....”
3) Sympathize with their feelings. “Use your ears more than your mouth....Begin with sympathy, not solutions. Don’t try to talk people out of how they feel at first. Just listen and let them unload emotionally without being defensive. Nod that you understand even when you don’t agree. Feelings are not always true or logical. In fact, resentment makes us act and think in foolish ways....”
4) Confess your part in the conflict. “Confession is a powerful tool for reconciliation. Often the way we handle a conflict creates a bigger hurt than the original problem itself. When you begin by humbly admitting your mistakes, it defuses the other person’s anger and disarms their attacks because they were probably expecting you to be defensive. Don’t make excuses or shift the blame; just honestly own up to any part you have played in the conflict. Accept responsibility for your mistakes and ask for forgiveness....”
5) Attack the problem, not the person. “You cannot fix the problem if you’re consumed with fixing the blame. You must choose between the two....”
6) Cooperate as much as possible. “Peace always has a price tag. Sometimes it costs our pride; often it costs our self-centeredness. For the sake of fellowship, do your best to compromise, adjust to others, and show preference to what they need....”
7) Emphasize reconciliation, not resolution. “It is unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on everything. Reconciliation focuses on the relationship, while resolution focuses on the problem. When we focus on reconciliation, the problem loses significance and often becomes irrelevant. We can reestablish a relationship even when we are unable to resolve our differences...we can disagree without being disagreeable....God expects unity, not uniformity, and we can walk arm-in-arm without seeing eye-to-eye on every issue. This doesn’t mean you give up on finding a solution. You may need to continue discussing and even debating -- but you do it in a spirit of harmony. Reconciliation means you bury the hatchet, not necessarily the issue...”
When we discover how to focus on the things we have in common, when we are realistic in our expectations for ourselves and others, and when we consciously decide to be encouraging and supportive, rather than critical and uncooperative, authentic community is close at hand. So reach out to your neighbors and fellow creatures, in a spirit of love and concern, with an attitude of honesty and accountability, and in a covenant of mutual trust and support, and know that we share both memories and hopes, which are the substance of our common life together.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Sunday, November 13, 2005
TO BE OF USE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday November 13, 2005
I thought I might start out this morning by sharing one of my favorite stories from Divinity School. A chicken and a pig were walking down the street when they came to a diner with a sign in the window that said “Breakfast Anytime.” The chicken says to the pig, “you know, you and I should get together and do something like this to serve our neighbors and fellow creatures.” And the pig replies “that’s easy for you to say. For you, bacon and eggs is just a donation. For me it’s a life commitment.”
OK, here’s another variation. A chicken and a pig were walking down the street when they came to a diner with a sign in the window that said “Breakfast Anytime.” So they went inside and ordered French Toast...in the Renaissance....
I feel very strongly that laughter is an essential element of a healthy human spirituality. We all need to be reminded from time to time not to take ourselves too seriously, to keep our grandiose pretensions in balance, and to remember that sometimes the universe surprises us in ways we can’t avoid or control, and which make a mockery of all our attempts to do so. And this is true even when (and maybe even especially when) the world doesn’t seem to give us much to laugh about. Wars and riots and earthquakes and hurricanes: so much suffering, and so little we seem to be able to do about it. Our donations seem like only a drop in the bucket, and even if we were to commit our entire lives to the cause, it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough. Nor do we really have the option of simply walking through an open door and emerge in in a better place and time, no matter how much we may daydream about enjoying French Toast in the Renaissance.
Yet the temptation, at least, to attempt to seal ourselves of from the unwelcome intrusions of the wider world is almost as overwhelming as the events themselves. At times it seems to me as if our entire social economy is built around this seductive fantasy: that if we could just somehow acquire enough power, if we could just somehow acquire enough wealth and status and worldly “success,” we might also somehow insulate ourselves behind high walls and locked gates from all life’s suffering and the misery of the world. Personally, I’ve never been wealthy or powerful enough to know firsthand whether or not this is true, but everything I’ve ever read on the subject tends to make me skeptical. Wealth and Power can obviously buy a certain degree of physical comfort and security, and perhaps even a measure of envy and respect from one’s less-fortunate neighbors (emotions which unfortunately lead just as often to resentment as they do to admiration). But the obsessive urge to acquire more and more beyond a certain level of safety and comfort might easily be considered a form of mental illness, especially if it done at the expense of the more fundamental social relationships with friends, family, and neighbors which ultimately make like meaningful.
Figuring out “how much is enough” is one of those problems everyone should have. Yet I don’t want to make light of it either. The challenge of balancing our ambitions for worldly success with the spiritual wisdom that teaches us simply “to be of use” to others is a difficult one. It’s more than just an inability to distinguish between our “wants” and our “needs.”’ Rather, this challenge reflects a need to differentiate between our natural but often unhealthy desires to achieve, to acquire, and even to dominate, and the equally powerful human aspirations to create, to understand, to love and be loved, to achieve inner peace, and perhaps even leave a lasting and meaningful legacy that will endure beyond our lifetimes.
These are the qualities that mark the difference between a life that is only self-serving, and life devoted to the service of others. It’s not just a matter of choosing between selfishness and selflessness. Rather, it’s the recognition that our own happiness is ultimately best served through a life that looks beyond ourselves alone to the safety and prosperity and happiness of others as well. It really is just that simple. And yet how quickly and easily we come to forget it when events in the world around us make us feel anxious and afraid, and our efforts to change things for the better seem futile.
The subject of altruism -- an unselfish concern for the welfare of others -- is something of interest not only to ethicists, but also biologists. One of the reasons that 19th century evangelical Christians like William Jennings Bryan (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) were so opposed to the teaching of evolution in schools was their belief that the philosophy of Social Darwinism, with its soulless doctrine of “survival of the fittest,” tended to undermine more traditional religious teachings about compassion for the poor (ironic when you think about how these respective ideologies have evolved in our own day). When I was a freshman at the University of Washington, I had a biology teacher who was determined to convince us that, in the natural world, so-called examples of real altruism were merely myths, and that animals always instinctively act in their own genetic self-interest. I especially remember him explaining how one of the classical examples of animal altruism form the ancient world, the famous stories about dolphins who rescued shipwrecked mariners from drowning by keeping them afloat and assisting them to shore, was actually just an anthropomorphic misinterpretation of the natural playfulness of these intelligent marine mammals. “We’ll never really know,” he told our class one morning, “how many shipwrecked sailors were almost safely to the beach when a group of dolphins swam along and pushed them out to sea again.”
But it turns out that my freshman biology professor didn’t have it entirely correct either. Many intelligent social animals -- not just dolphins, but also apes, and dogs, and even rats -- demonstrate a fairly well-developed sense of empathy, and at times behave in ways that might even be considered compassionate. Yet they are also capable of organized and premeditated violent aggression, as well as acting with both self-sacrificing courage, and self-centered cowardice. They can be both generous and duplicitous, both kind and cruel. So it would appear that the so-called “natural” world is actually a lot more complicated than perhaps at first we thought. And the great insight of biology is not so much that we are no different than other animals in our struggle for survival, but that in many ways some animals, at least, are little different from us.
Returning for a moment to the realm of human ethics, altruism might best be described as coming in at least three distinct flavors. The first of these is generally characterized as enlightened self-interest, in which our generous good works also contribute to a greater good from which either we or those close to us also benefit. The second consists of the proverbial “random acts of kindness” where our good deeds may not necessarily benefit us directly, but they don’t really cost us much either. And the third is the genuinely self-sacrificial, that “last full measure of devotion” which we praise so profoundly as a society at times like Veterans Day, and for which we reserve our highest public praise and honor. Biologists may be skeptical, but community, society, even civilization itself, all depend upon a certain degree of altruism -- a spirit of public service in which individuals do not merely seek to serve their own self-interests (whether enlightened or merely avaricious,) but also commit themselves “to be of use” to the greater good. True Community is built upon a foundation of reciprocal obligation and mutual trust, and without them Civil Society truly does devolve into the law of the jungle, and a Hobbesean war of all against all.
Ideals of public service and nobless oblige are deeply rooted in both the Universalist and the Unitarian traditions. The Scripture teaches that “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded;” and both Universalist farmers and Unitarians merchants and mill owners took this prescription very much to heart. Yet “Christian Charity” was not considered merely an activity for the well-to-do. The “genteel poverty” of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, with its family values of service, duty, sacrifice, and love of neighbor, reflects an understanding of “usefulness” which places our ability to do good for others squarely at the center of our own self-worth, regardless of our family’s net worth. My favorite statement of this 19th century commandment “To Be of Use” is the motto of Edward Everett Hale’s “Lend a Hand Club” (which I know we have read here in church before). “I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
These notions of usefulness were also intimately connected to the idea of Character, and to the traditional religious doctrine of Vocation. The belief that every individual not only has a general but also a specific “calling” from God -- a potential, a destiny, which is uniquely our own and which it is our duty to fulfill -- is a persistent theme in American religious life, from the days of the Puritans down to our own. Yet sometimes this encouragement to “follow our bliss” becomes disconnected from the more basic responsibilities of love of God and love of neighbor. People find their identity in their relationship to a community as much as they do from the introspective examination of their own souls. Who we are and what we do not only reflect one another, they also shape and define one another, as we grow over time into the individuals our Creator intends for us to be.
In his bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life (which you may recall was the inspiration for this series of sermons), Rick Warren uses the acronym SHAPE to describe his understanding of how people of faith might best determine the unique contribution which each of us is called to make, and through which our lives find their true meaning, when we commit ourselves fully to achieving it. ‘S’ stands for the discernment of “Spiritual Gifts.” These gifts are talents and abilities which have been freely given to us, but which we must first “unwrap” before they can be put to use. No one individual receives every gift, yet when we use our gifts together cooperatively everyone benefits. ‘H’ stands for listen to your Heart. One of the ways we discover our gifts is to pursue the things we truly love, to be honest with ourselves rather than following the tastes of the world. The things that excite us, the things which most interest us and command our attention, the activities which we naturally embrace with enthusiasm and enjoyment, are fantastic clues for determining where our true gifts may be found, and where they may find their best employment. And the opposite is also true: if there are some activities which you always seem to find frustrating, or which cause you to grow easily discouraged, perhaps your gifts lie in other areas.
‘A’ stands for applying your Abilities. We all have different gifts, but we also have abilities which we have worked to develop, and which reflect our spiritual gifts honed to a high level of skill. Applying our abilities means using our skills for the good of others rather than mere personal satisfaction, and remembering that whatever we do in life should somehow reflect our higher purpose. ‘P’ stands for empowering our Personalities. It’s not just our skills, but also our temperaments, that make us who were are. Some of us our introverts, and some of us are extroverts. Some of us are very practical and detail oriented, while others are more emotional, or perhaps enjoy vivid and creative imaginations which allow them to see things that others don’t. Some of us like variety, and some of us like routine...but understanding how our personalities work and what our preferences are likewise an important step in defining our unique call to service. Finally, ‘E’ stands for employing our Experience. Not everything we try in life turns out as well as we hope it might. But even our failures and disappointments can teach us things that will someday prove useful, and which are often more important than the things we learn from success.
So, discern your Spiritual Gifts, listen to your Heart, apply your Abilities, empower your Personality, and employ your Experience. And above all, remember than we live not for ourselves alone, but for all the living creatures who have come before us, or who will follow after.
Last Monday I attended the reception for Hal and Shirley Sauer at the town hall. And I was very moved by the brief speech Hal made after receiving his award, after all the other speeches describing Hal’s decades of service from being a Cub Scout leader to his current work on the Board of Appeals. It was just two sentences, and although I can’t remember it word for word, here’s the gist of it: “If all the work I did over the years did some good for the town, that’s great. But it was nothing compared to the good it did for me to do it.”
I personally find Hal’s example very inspirational. And I hope it will be an inspiration for all of you as well.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday November 13, 2005
I thought I might start out this morning by sharing one of my favorite stories from Divinity School. A chicken and a pig were walking down the street when they came to a diner with a sign in the window that said “Breakfast Anytime.” The chicken says to the pig, “you know, you and I should get together and do something like this to serve our neighbors and fellow creatures.” And the pig replies “that’s easy for you to say. For you, bacon and eggs is just a donation. For me it’s a life commitment.”
OK, here’s another variation. A chicken and a pig were walking down the street when they came to a diner with a sign in the window that said “Breakfast Anytime.” So they went inside and ordered French Toast...in the Renaissance....
I feel very strongly that laughter is an essential element of a healthy human spirituality. We all need to be reminded from time to time not to take ourselves too seriously, to keep our grandiose pretensions in balance, and to remember that sometimes the universe surprises us in ways we can’t avoid or control, and which make a mockery of all our attempts to do so. And this is true even when (and maybe even especially when) the world doesn’t seem to give us much to laugh about. Wars and riots and earthquakes and hurricanes: so much suffering, and so little we seem to be able to do about it. Our donations seem like only a drop in the bucket, and even if we were to commit our entire lives to the cause, it just doesn’t feel like it would be enough. Nor do we really have the option of simply walking through an open door and emerge in in a better place and time, no matter how much we may daydream about enjoying French Toast in the Renaissance.
Yet the temptation, at least, to attempt to seal ourselves of from the unwelcome intrusions of the wider world is almost as overwhelming as the events themselves. At times it seems to me as if our entire social economy is built around this seductive fantasy: that if we could just somehow acquire enough power, if we could just somehow acquire enough wealth and status and worldly “success,” we might also somehow insulate ourselves behind high walls and locked gates from all life’s suffering and the misery of the world. Personally, I’ve never been wealthy or powerful enough to know firsthand whether or not this is true, but everything I’ve ever read on the subject tends to make me skeptical. Wealth and Power can obviously buy a certain degree of physical comfort and security, and perhaps even a measure of envy and respect from one’s less-fortunate neighbors (emotions which unfortunately lead just as often to resentment as they do to admiration). But the obsessive urge to acquire more and more beyond a certain level of safety and comfort might easily be considered a form of mental illness, especially if it done at the expense of the more fundamental social relationships with friends, family, and neighbors which ultimately make like meaningful.
Figuring out “how much is enough” is one of those problems everyone should have. Yet I don’t want to make light of it either. The challenge of balancing our ambitions for worldly success with the spiritual wisdom that teaches us simply “to be of use” to others is a difficult one. It’s more than just an inability to distinguish between our “wants” and our “needs.”’ Rather, this challenge reflects a need to differentiate between our natural but often unhealthy desires to achieve, to acquire, and even to dominate, and the equally powerful human aspirations to create, to understand, to love and be loved, to achieve inner peace, and perhaps even leave a lasting and meaningful legacy that will endure beyond our lifetimes.
These are the qualities that mark the difference between a life that is only self-serving, and life devoted to the service of others. It’s not just a matter of choosing between selfishness and selflessness. Rather, it’s the recognition that our own happiness is ultimately best served through a life that looks beyond ourselves alone to the safety and prosperity and happiness of others as well. It really is just that simple. And yet how quickly and easily we come to forget it when events in the world around us make us feel anxious and afraid, and our efforts to change things for the better seem futile.
The subject of altruism -- an unselfish concern for the welfare of others -- is something of interest not only to ethicists, but also biologists. One of the reasons that 19th century evangelical Christians like William Jennings Bryan (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) were so opposed to the teaching of evolution in schools was their belief that the philosophy of Social Darwinism, with its soulless doctrine of “survival of the fittest,” tended to undermine more traditional religious teachings about compassion for the poor (ironic when you think about how these respective ideologies have evolved in our own day). When I was a freshman at the University of Washington, I had a biology teacher who was determined to convince us that, in the natural world, so-called examples of real altruism were merely myths, and that animals always instinctively act in their own genetic self-interest. I especially remember him explaining how one of the classical examples of animal altruism form the ancient world, the famous stories about dolphins who rescued shipwrecked mariners from drowning by keeping them afloat and assisting them to shore, was actually just an anthropomorphic misinterpretation of the natural playfulness of these intelligent marine mammals. “We’ll never really know,” he told our class one morning, “how many shipwrecked sailors were almost safely to the beach when a group of dolphins swam along and pushed them out to sea again.”
But it turns out that my freshman biology professor didn’t have it entirely correct either. Many intelligent social animals -- not just dolphins, but also apes, and dogs, and even rats -- demonstrate a fairly well-developed sense of empathy, and at times behave in ways that might even be considered compassionate. Yet they are also capable of organized and premeditated violent aggression, as well as acting with both self-sacrificing courage, and self-centered cowardice. They can be both generous and duplicitous, both kind and cruel. So it would appear that the so-called “natural” world is actually a lot more complicated than perhaps at first we thought. And the great insight of biology is not so much that we are no different than other animals in our struggle for survival, but that in many ways some animals, at least, are little different from us.
Returning for a moment to the realm of human ethics, altruism might best be described as coming in at least three distinct flavors. The first of these is generally characterized as enlightened self-interest, in which our generous good works also contribute to a greater good from which either we or those close to us also benefit. The second consists of the proverbial “random acts of kindness” where our good deeds may not necessarily benefit us directly, but they don’t really cost us much either. And the third is the genuinely self-sacrificial, that “last full measure of devotion” which we praise so profoundly as a society at times like Veterans Day, and for which we reserve our highest public praise and honor. Biologists may be skeptical, but community, society, even civilization itself, all depend upon a certain degree of altruism -- a spirit of public service in which individuals do not merely seek to serve their own self-interests (whether enlightened or merely avaricious,) but also commit themselves “to be of use” to the greater good. True Community is built upon a foundation of reciprocal obligation and mutual trust, and without them Civil Society truly does devolve into the law of the jungle, and a Hobbesean war of all against all.
Ideals of public service and nobless oblige are deeply rooted in both the Universalist and the Unitarian traditions. The Scripture teaches that “from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded;” and both Universalist farmers and Unitarians merchants and mill owners took this prescription very much to heart. Yet “Christian Charity” was not considered merely an activity for the well-to-do. The “genteel poverty” of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, with its family values of service, duty, sacrifice, and love of neighbor, reflects an understanding of “usefulness” which places our ability to do good for others squarely at the center of our own self-worth, regardless of our family’s net worth. My favorite statement of this 19th century commandment “To Be of Use” is the motto of Edward Everett Hale’s “Lend a Hand Club” (which I know we have read here in church before). “I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
These notions of usefulness were also intimately connected to the idea of Character, and to the traditional religious doctrine of Vocation. The belief that every individual not only has a general but also a specific “calling” from God -- a potential, a destiny, which is uniquely our own and which it is our duty to fulfill -- is a persistent theme in American religious life, from the days of the Puritans down to our own. Yet sometimes this encouragement to “follow our bliss” becomes disconnected from the more basic responsibilities of love of God and love of neighbor. People find their identity in their relationship to a community as much as they do from the introspective examination of their own souls. Who we are and what we do not only reflect one another, they also shape and define one another, as we grow over time into the individuals our Creator intends for us to be.
In his bestselling book The Purpose Driven Life (which you may recall was the inspiration for this series of sermons), Rick Warren uses the acronym SHAPE to describe his understanding of how people of faith might best determine the unique contribution which each of us is called to make, and through which our lives find their true meaning, when we commit ourselves fully to achieving it. ‘S’ stands for the discernment of “Spiritual Gifts.” These gifts are talents and abilities which have been freely given to us, but which we must first “unwrap” before they can be put to use. No one individual receives every gift, yet when we use our gifts together cooperatively everyone benefits. ‘H’ stands for listen to your Heart. One of the ways we discover our gifts is to pursue the things we truly love, to be honest with ourselves rather than following the tastes of the world. The things that excite us, the things which most interest us and command our attention, the activities which we naturally embrace with enthusiasm and enjoyment, are fantastic clues for determining where our true gifts may be found, and where they may find their best employment. And the opposite is also true: if there are some activities which you always seem to find frustrating, or which cause you to grow easily discouraged, perhaps your gifts lie in other areas.
‘A’ stands for applying your Abilities. We all have different gifts, but we also have abilities which we have worked to develop, and which reflect our spiritual gifts honed to a high level of skill. Applying our abilities means using our skills for the good of others rather than mere personal satisfaction, and remembering that whatever we do in life should somehow reflect our higher purpose. ‘P’ stands for empowering our Personalities. It’s not just our skills, but also our temperaments, that make us who were are. Some of us our introverts, and some of us are extroverts. Some of us are very practical and detail oriented, while others are more emotional, or perhaps enjoy vivid and creative imaginations which allow them to see things that others don’t. Some of us like variety, and some of us like routine...but understanding how our personalities work and what our preferences are likewise an important step in defining our unique call to service. Finally, ‘E’ stands for employing our Experience. Not everything we try in life turns out as well as we hope it might. But even our failures and disappointments can teach us things that will someday prove useful, and which are often more important than the things we learn from success.
So, discern your Spiritual Gifts, listen to your Heart, apply your Abilities, empower your Personality, and employ your Experience. And above all, remember than we live not for ourselves alone, but for all the living creatures who have come before us, or who will follow after.
Last Monday I attended the reception for Hal and Shirley Sauer at the town hall. And I was very moved by the brief speech Hal made after receiving his award, after all the other speeches describing Hal’s decades of service from being a Cub Scout leader to his current work on the Board of Appeals. It was just two sentences, and although I can’t remember it word for word, here’s the gist of it: “If all the work I did over the years did some good for the town, that’s great. But it was nothing compared to the good it did for me to do it.”
I personally find Hal’s example very inspirational. And I hope it will be an inspiration for all of you as well.
Sunday, November 6, 2005
MORE THAN A CELEBRATION
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday November 6th, 2005
It’s a fairly well-known point of minor historical trivia that the inspiration for Emerson’s “spectral” preacher, immortalized for generations of subsequent seminarians as the stellar example of what a minister should aspire NOT to become, was none other than the Reverend Mr. Barzillai Frost, junior colleague to Ralph Waldo’s own ninety-year-old step-grandfather Ezra Ripley just up the road at the First Parish in Concord. And I suspect that at least some of you knew this already, since it tends to be something that virtually every incoming Harvard Unitarian Universalist Divinity Student learns sometime during their first semester, and then often incorporates into one of their early student sermons. Emerson’s Divinity School address is perhaps the next best thing to scripture in our denomination, at least for clergy, and his admonition to “acquaint men [and one assumes women as well] at first hand with deity” is a charge which every rookie Unitarian Universalist preacher learns to take seriously. Yet one of the details often overlooked in those early student sermons is that Barzillai Frost faithfully served the people of Concord for two decades, and left those duties behind only when failing health forced him out of the ministry (and into an early grave) when he was still in his fifties, while Emerson resigned his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church after only three years, (although, in fairness, he then went on to become one of the most celebrated American writers of the 19th century, before finally passing away only a month shy of his eightieth birthday).
Here’s another seldom-mentioned bit of trivia about the Divinity School Address. Scholars believe that the “devout person who prized the Sabbath,” who Emerson overheard “say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church’...“ was actually Emerson’s own wife Lidian, and her comments were inspired, not by her local pastor Barzillai Frost, but by a visiting preacher, her husband’s half-uncle the Reverend Samuel Ripley. So even in the same family, people have different tastes. And although Emerson himself would later write in his essay on Self-Reliance “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,” like his wife he also prized both the sabbath and a good sermon. At the conclusion of the Divinity School Address he characterized preaching and the sabbath as the “two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us” and challenged his listeners to “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing” rather than attempting to invent something new. The Sabbath he described as “the jubilee of the whole world, whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being,” while good preachers “speak the very truth, as...life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts...with new hope and new revelations....”
Bold statements like these may suggest to some that Sunday is really all about the sermon, along with the implicit corollary that without good preaching, the sabbath is basically a waste of time. Yet I doubt this is truly what Emerson had in mind. People spend their Sabbath attending church and participating in public worship for all sorts of other (some might even say better) reasons than listening to a sermon. Some come for the music, so that they might feel uplifted and inspired in ways that mere words can never really manage to achieve. Some come simply to see their friends, and to feel connected to a society of “neighbors and fellow creatures” with whom they share a common history, common values, and a common vision of the future. Or perhaps they are feeling alone and fragile, and long for that sense of connection to something larger and more enduring than themselves.
These are all great reasons for coming to church, and investing (I won’t say “spending”) ...investing an hour or so of our lives each week in the routine attempt to forge a connection, a “communion,” with something greater than ourselves alone: to a wider community of friends and family, neighbors and strangers, each of whom has inherent worth and dignity, and who together form part of the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are also a part; or to that vital Force which gives us life, and the powerful Spirit which gives life meaning -- to become part of the Circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and to know, deep within our hearts, that we are both part of the whole and still whole within ourselves. This is why people come to church, and wouldn’t it be great if it happened for everyone every Sunday. But you’ll have to confess, that’s a pretty tall order. Yet hopefully, on any given Sunday it happens for someone, and over time we all have our turn.
These are some of the reasons people come to church. But what do we actually DO here? And by this I don’t mean the important but mundane (that word means “worldly” by the way) work of institutional maintenance. Rather, what do we do when we participate in an Act of Worship? The word “liturgy” means literally “the work of the people” -- so what kind of religious or “spiritual” work are we talking about when we create a “liturgy” together?
Obviously the preaching has something to do with it. Saint Augustine once wrote that the purpose of a sermon is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” which logically leads me to the assumption that the purpose of listening to a sermon is to be instructed, delighted, and inspired. But there’s obviously a lot more going on here than just a sermon, which at best takes up only about 25-30% of our time together. So what else do we do in the way of “people work” during this hour on Sunday morning? And what do we hope to get back in return for our efforts?
I’d like to suggest that there are actually at least four different activities that comprise the work of worship, some of which overlap, all of which go together, and which build upon one another in order to change both our lives and the world for the better.
And the first of these, the one we talk about all the time, is the work of Celebration. Celebration, in the sense of its original Latin root, is the work of honoring or praising publicly -- it is the same root as the word “celebrity” -- and it also has a technical meaning in the sense of performing the ceremony of the Roman Catholic Mass, or formally observing any other public “holy” day. But I prefer the colloquial definition, which is “to have a convivial good time.” Celebration is the unrestrained expression of pure human joy. It’s a party, where we loosen up and let our hair down and just take pleasure in the experience of being alive. To worship is to celebrate: to honor and praise the force which gives us life, and to manifest that force in meaningful ways which fill us with a spirit of love and compassion and transform us into something better and greater than we now are.
But worship is more than just celebration. Worship is also an act of Devotion, through which we demonstrate our commitment to the values and principles that make our lives meaningful. Devotion is one of those great religious words which we hear all the time, but rarely take the time to ponder. A devotee is basically anyone who has taken a vow, and who by doing so not only becomes devoted, but also devout. The word simply oozes with connotations of piety and holiness, but generally when we hear it in ordinary usage it is almost always in the context of marriage and family: the devoted husband, wife, parent, child...people who are bound together not only by formal vows, but by bonds stronger than any vow. Yet ultimately these avowed obligations which bind us together are religious in nature: they also bind us again (RE-ligious) to something larger than ourselves, which was here before we got here and will still be here when we’ve gone.
The work of Worship also often includes an act of personal Sacrifice. In fact, if you just think back a bit about the likely historical and anthropological origins of worship, sacrifice was probably right there at the top of the list from day one. Sacrifice means giving up something of value, typically with the expectation of receiving back something even more valuable. Primitive people offered sacrifices of animals and agricultural produce -- and sometimes even the lives of other human beings -- in order to appease angry gods, or perhaps in the hope of cultivating divine favor. When someone sacrifices in baseball it means giving up an out in order to get a run, or at least to move a runner into scoring position. Yet on another level sacrifice is also an act of submission, acceptance, and obedience: the recognition and acknowledgment that there are certain things which are simply beyond our own power to control, and that we sometimes need help from a higher power in order to obtain or achieve the things we truly desire.
In the ancient world the sacrificial system also often functioned as a vehicle for the redistribution of wealth and the creation of social capital. Those who had been blessed with a bountiful harvest were expected to offer the first fruits of their produce to God at the local temple, where it went to support the priests and was also redistributed to those in need. The word “sacrifice” itself means, literally, “to make sacred.” When we surrender or “give up” some portion of ourselves and our goods to a greater power or a greater good, we undergo a process of personal transformation which somehow brings us closer to the power of Goodness itself, creating a relationship of trust and mutuality in which we receive back in proportion to what we have given away. It’s almost as if, by letting go of some things we create an open space in our lives which can then be filled with something else. When we stop trying to grasp and cling to everything in reach, our hands miraculously become free to embrace something new and different and even more precious.
This brings me to the fourth thing I wanted to talk about today, which is that the work of worship is also often simply an expression of Gratitude, which manifests itself through acts of Love and Creativity, Charity and Generosity. And it’s funny how those two sets of words have such different connotations, even though they are essentially synonyms. Charity MEANS Love. Generosity IS Creativity.
Gratitude is an attitude of thankfulness, and is related to a variety of other familiar English words which share the same Latin root: gratify and gratification (as in to give or receive pleasure or satisfaction), gratuity (which is generally some sort of gift or monetary “tip” for service), gratuitous (something that is uncalled for or done without sufficient reason), and of course gratis (meaning “free”).
Both charity and generosity also carry with them this same deeper sense of something ”freely given,” which is one of the things that differentiates these words from more general understandings of love and creativity. A profound sense of Gratitude is at the heart of many of the core values which inform both authentic spirituality and a meaningful religious faith and practice: compassion, hospitality, humility, forgiveness, to name just a few. We express our gratitude for what we have received -- beginning with the precious gift of life itself -- by “paying forward” to those in need: a tangible celebration of our devotion to a greater good, and the sacrifices we willingly make in order to attain it.
A few weeks ago you may recall I mentioned Rick Warren’s idea that worship is anything that makes God smile. I love this image, and try to keep it in mind throughout the week as I prepare myself to stand up here and lead our weekly worship service. It is a work we do in partial fulfillment of the mission explicit in our covenant: “to the end that all souls might grow into harmony with the Divine.”
And over the years I have learned to look for God’s smile in the smiling faces I look forward to seeing here every Sunday, as together we “raise a joyous noise to the Lord” and gather for prayer, and to make our offerings, and to hear a little preaching which attempts, at least, to convert life into truth, and thus bring us closer to both God and one another.
READING:
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is [hu]man[ity] made sensible that [we are] infinite soul[s], that the earth and heavens are passing into [our] mind[s]; that [we are] drinking forever the soul of God?...
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us.... I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more....A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no[t] one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact of his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted, bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, -- life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman, or any other fact of his biography.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday November 6th, 2005
It’s a fairly well-known point of minor historical trivia that the inspiration for Emerson’s “spectral” preacher, immortalized for generations of subsequent seminarians as the stellar example of what a minister should aspire NOT to become, was none other than the Reverend Mr. Barzillai Frost, junior colleague to Ralph Waldo’s own ninety-year-old step-grandfather Ezra Ripley just up the road at the First Parish in Concord. And I suspect that at least some of you knew this already, since it tends to be something that virtually every incoming Harvard Unitarian Universalist Divinity Student learns sometime during their first semester, and then often incorporates into one of their early student sermons. Emerson’s Divinity School address is perhaps the next best thing to scripture in our denomination, at least for clergy, and his admonition to “acquaint men [and one assumes women as well] at first hand with deity” is a charge which every rookie Unitarian Universalist preacher learns to take seriously. Yet one of the details often overlooked in those early student sermons is that Barzillai Frost faithfully served the people of Concord for two decades, and left those duties behind only when failing health forced him out of the ministry (and into an early grave) when he was still in his fifties, while Emerson resigned his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church after only three years, (although, in fairness, he then went on to become one of the most celebrated American writers of the 19th century, before finally passing away only a month shy of his eightieth birthday).
Here’s another seldom-mentioned bit of trivia about the Divinity School Address. Scholars believe that the “devout person who prized the Sabbath,” who Emerson overheard “say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it seems wicked to go to church’...“ was actually Emerson’s own wife Lidian, and her comments were inspired, not by her local pastor Barzillai Frost, but by a visiting preacher, her husband’s half-uncle the Reverend Samuel Ripley. So even in the same family, people have different tastes. And although Emerson himself would later write in his essay on Self-Reliance “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,” like his wife he also prized both the sabbath and a good sermon. At the conclusion of the Divinity School Address he characterized preaching and the sabbath as the “two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us” and challenged his listeners to “let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing” rather than attempting to invent something new. The Sabbath he described as “the jubilee of the whole world, whose light dawns welcome alike into the closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being,” while good preachers “speak the very truth, as...life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts...with new hope and new revelations....”
Bold statements like these may suggest to some that Sunday is really all about the sermon, along with the implicit corollary that without good preaching, the sabbath is basically a waste of time. Yet I doubt this is truly what Emerson had in mind. People spend their Sabbath attending church and participating in public worship for all sorts of other (some might even say better) reasons than listening to a sermon. Some come for the music, so that they might feel uplifted and inspired in ways that mere words can never really manage to achieve. Some come simply to see their friends, and to feel connected to a society of “neighbors and fellow creatures” with whom they share a common history, common values, and a common vision of the future. Or perhaps they are feeling alone and fragile, and long for that sense of connection to something larger and more enduring than themselves.
These are all great reasons for coming to church, and investing (I won’t say “spending”) ...investing an hour or so of our lives each week in the routine attempt to forge a connection, a “communion,” with something greater than ourselves alone: to a wider community of friends and family, neighbors and strangers, each of whom has inherent worth and dignity, and who together form part of the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are also a part; or to that vital Force which gives us life, and the powerful Spirit which gives life meaning -- to become part of the Circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, and to know, deep within our hearts, that we are both part of the whole and still whole within ourselves. This is why people come to church, and wouldn’t it be great if it happened for everyone every Sunday. But you’ll have to confess, that’s a pretty tall order. Yet hopefully, on any given Sunday it happens for someone, and over time we all have our turn.
These are some of the reasons people come to church. But what do we actually DO here? And by this I don’t mean the important but mundane (that word means “worldly” by the way) work of institutional maintenance. Rather, what do we do when we participate in an Act of Worship? The word “liturgy” means literally “the work of the people” -- so what kind of religious or “spiritual” work are we talking about when we create a “liturgy” together?
Obviously the preaching has something to do with it. Saint Augustine once wrote that the purpose of a sermon is “to instruct, to delight, and to inspire” which logically leads me to the assumption that the purpose of listening to a sermon is to be instructed, delighted, and inspired. But there’s obviously a lot more going on here than just a sermon, which at best takes up only about 25-30% of our time together. So what else do we do in the way of “people work” during this hour on Sunday morning? And what do we hope to get back in return for our efforts?
I’d like to suggest that there are actually at least four different activities that comprise the work of worship, some of which overlap, all of which go together, and which build upon one another in order to change both our lives and the world for the better.
And the first of these, the one we talk about all the time, is the work of Celebration. Celebration, in the sense of its original Latin root, is the work of honoring or praising publicly -- it is the same root as the word “celebrity” -- and it also has a technical meaning in the sense of performing the ceremony of the Roman Catholic Mass, or formally observing any other public “holy” day. But I prefer the colloquial definition, which is “to have a convivial good time.” Celebration is the unrestrained expression of pure human joy. It’s a party, where we loosen up and let our hair down and just take pleasure in the experience of being alive. To worship is to celebrate: to honor and praise the force which gives us life, and to manifest that force in meaningful ways which fill us with a spirit of love and compassion and transform us into something better and greater than we now are.
But worship is more than just celebration. Worship is also an act of Devotion, through which we demonstrate our commitment to the values and principles that make our lives meaningful. Devotion is one of those great religious words which we hear all the time, but rarely take the time to ponder. A devotee is basically anyone who has taken a vow, and who by doing so not only becomes devoted, but also devout. The word simply oozes with connotations of piety and holiness, but generally when we hear it in ordinary usage it is almost always in the context of marriage and family: the devoted husband, wife, parent, child...people who are bound together not only by formal vows, but by bonds stronger than any vow. Yet ultimately these avowed obligations which bind us together are religious in nature: they also bind us again (RE-ligious) to something larger than ourselves, which was here before we got here and will still be here when we’ve gone.
The work of Worship also often includes an act of personal Sacrifice. In fact, if you just think back a bit about the likely historical and anthropological origins of worship, sacrifice was probably right there at the top of the list from day one. Sacrifice means giving up something of value, typically with the expectation of receiving back something even more valuable. Primitive people offered sacrifices of animals and agricultural produce -- and sometimes even the lives of other human beings -- in order to appease angry gods, or perhaps in the hope of cultivating divine favor. When someone sacrifices in baseball it means giving up an out in order to get a run, or at least to move a runner into scoring position. Yet on another level sacrifice is also an act of submission, acceptance, and obedience: the recognition and acknowledgment that there are certain things which are simply beyond our own power to control, and that we sometimes need help from a higher power in order to obtain or achieve the things we truly desire.
In the ancient world the sacrificial system also often functioned as a vehicle for the redistribution of wealth and the creation of social capital. Those who had been blessed with a bountiful harvest were expected to offer the first fruits of their produce to God at the local temple, where it went to support the priests and was also redistributed to those in need. The word “sacrifice” itself means, literally, “to make sacred.” When we surrender or “give up” some portion of ourselves and our goods to a greater power or a greater good, we undergo a process of personal transformation which somehow brings us closer to the power of Goodness itself, creating a relationship of trust and mutuality in which we receive back in proportion to what we have given away. It’s almost as if, by letting go of some things we create an open space in our lives which can then be filled with something else. When we stop trying to grasp and cling to everything in reach, our hands miraculously become free to embrace something new and different and even more precious.
This brings me to the fourth thing I wanted to talk about today, which is that the work of worship is also often simply an expression of Gratitude, which manifests itself through acts of Love and Creativity, Charity and Generosity. And it’s funny how those two sets of words have such different connotations, even though they are essentially synonyms. Charity MEANS Love. Generosity IS Creativity.
Gratitude is an attitude of thankfulness, and is related to a variety of other familiar English words which share the same Latin root: gratify and gratification (as in to give or receive pleasure or satisfaction), gratuity (which is generally some sort of gift or monetary “tip” for service), gratuitous (something that is uncalled for or done without sufficient reason), and of course gratis (meaning “free”).
Both charity and generosity also carry with them this same deeper sense of something ”freely given,” which is one of the things that differentiates these words from more general understandings of love and creativity. A profound sense of Gratitude is at the heart of many of the core values which inform both authentic spirituality and a meaningful religious faith and practice: compassion, hospitality, humility, forgiveness, to name just a few. We express our gratitude for what we have received -- beginning with the precious gift of life itself -- by “paying forward” to those in need: a tangible celebration of our devotion to a greater good, and the sacrifices we willingly make in order to attain it.
A few weeks ago you may recall I mentioned Rick Warren’s idea that worship is anything that makes God smile. I love this image, and try to keep it in mind throughout the week as I prepare myself to stand up here and lead our weekly worship service. It is a work we do in partial fulfillment of the mission explicit in our covenant: “to the end that all souls might grow into harmony with the Divine.”
And over the years I have learned to look for God’s smile in the smiling faces I look forward to seeing here every Sunday, as together we “raise a joyous noise to the Lord” and gather for prayer, and to make our offerings, and to hear a little preaching which attempts, at least, to convert life into truth, and thus bring us closer to both God and one another.
READING:
Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment in application to the duties of life. In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is [hu]man[ity] made sensible that [we are] infinite soul[s], that the earth and heavens are passing into [our] mind[s]; that [we are] drinking forever the soul of God?...
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do not uplift, but smite and offend us.... I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more....A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no[t] one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, to convert life into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact of his experience, had he yet imported into his doctrine. This man had ploughed and planted, bought and sold; he had read books; he had eaten and drunken; his head aches; his heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he had ever lived at all. Not a line did he draw out of real history. The true preacher can be known by this, that he deals out to the people his life, -- life passed through the fire of thought. But of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon, what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a father or a child; whether he was a freeholder or a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a countryman, or any other fact of his biography.
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