A Religion Like Sunshine

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 8th, 2006

Opening Words: “Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep the juices flowing by jangling about gently as you move. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful. Avoid running at all times. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”


--Leroy “Satchel” Paige, How to Stay Young [Colliers, 1953]


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When I was living down in West Texas many years ago, I heard a story about a fundamentalist preacher who was driving home from a holiday party one New Year’s Eve when he was pulled over by a Texas Ranger.

Smelling alcohol on the minister’s breath, and noticing an empty wine bottle on the floor of the car, the officer asked: “Sir, have you been drinking?”

“Only water,” the evangelist replied.

The Ranger shined his flashlight on the bottle and said: “Then why do I smell wine?”

The preacher bent over and picked up the bottle, sniffed it and exclaimed “Praise Jesus! He’s done it again!”


I don’t know about you, but I for one am happy to have the holidays behind us. Even though the nights are still long and the weather bitter cold, and in many ways the worst days of winter are still ahead of us, it’s comforting to feel like we’ve at least turned a corner and are starting something new -- that from here on out the days are going to grow longer and longer (at least for the next six months) -- that the light is slowly but inexorably coming back into the world, and with it (eventually) warmer weather and the rebirth of new life in the spring.

Images of light and darkness are commonplace in the realm of theology. We seek enlightenment, see the light, or perhaps give ourselves over to the dark side, succumb to the temptations of the Prince of Darkness. And of course as you all know, virtually every week I like to conclude our service with a benediction that begins “Be ours a religious which like sunshine, goes everywhere.” These words (and the others which accompany them) were originally written by the 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (who is perhaps best known around here as the minister for whom my dog is named).

Theodore Parker was a remarkable man. He grew up in Lexington in a farming family (in fact his grandfather, Captain John Parker, had commanded the Minutemen on the Lexington Common in 1775). Parker attended Harvard College, but was never granted a degree because he couldn’t afford to pay his tuition, even though he completed the entire four year curriculum in about a year and a half. He was a prodigious scholar, an outspoken abolitionist and social activist, and he had some very radical ideas about theology as well, which at first were not very well received by his colleagues in the ministry, but eventually became widespread throughout our movement as a younger generation of ministers who greatly admired Parker and who shared his views began to preach about them to their congregations.

One of Parker’s most influential ideas was his concept of “Absolute Religion.” Parker believed that spirituality (or what would have been called in those days “the religious sentiment”) was something instinctive to the human soul, and that all historical religions were simply imperfect cultural manifestations of an underlying natural or “absolute” religion, which, like sunshine, was everywhere under the sun. These ideas weren’t original to Parker, but he expressed them with such eloquence and enthusiasm that his “new views” soon became known as “Parkerism,” while those who agreed with his “abundant heresies” were called “Parkerites.” Theodore Parker died of tuberculosis in 1860 at the age of 49, while on a trip to Italy which he hoped would restore his health. But his theology lived on in the hearts and minds of his many admirers, some of whom formed an organization known as the “Free Religious Association” in order to carry the flame of Parkerism beyond the boundaries of the Unitarian Church.

In the early 1870’s the Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke published a two-volume work titled Ten Great Religions which explored this idea of “the sympathy of religions” in great depth. Two decades later, Unitarians (and Universalists) in Chicago were the principal organizers of the first ever “World Parliament of Religions,” which brought together representatives of faith traditions from all across the globe in order to discuss the common themes among their faiths. By this time, Parker’s “new views” had become old hat, and his notion of “Absolute Religion” was an almost Universal article of faith among religious liberals and other freethinkers.

In the brief introduction to Unitarian Universalism he wrote in collaboration with his colleague John Buehrens titled Our Chosen Faith, Forrester Church uses an extended metaphor of a cathedral to describe the unity within diversity which undergirds this style of understanding the religious life of human kind....


*****
Imagine awakening one morning from a deep and dreamless sleep to find yourself in the nave of a vast cathedral. Like a child newborn, untutored save to moisture, nurture, rhythm, and the profound comforts at the heart of darkness, you open your eyes upon a world unseen, indeed unimaginable, before. It is a world of light and dancing shadow, stone and glass, life and death. This second birth, at once miraculous and natural, is in some ways not unlike the first. A new awakening, it consecrates your life with sacraments of pain you do not understand and promised joy you will never full call your own.

Such awakenings may happen only once in a lifetime, or many times. But when they do, what you took for granted before is presented as a gift: difficult, yet precious and good. Not that you know what to do with your gift, or even what it really means, only how much it matters. Awakening to the call stirring deep within you, the call of life itself -- the call of God -- you begin your pilgrimage.

Before you do, look about you; contemplate the mystery and contemplate with awe. This cathedral is as ancient as humankind, its cornerstone the first altar, marked with the tincture of blood and stained with tears. Search for a lifetime, which is all you are surely given, and you shall never know its limits, visit all its apses, worship at its myriad shrines, nor span its celestial ceiling with your gaze....

Welcome to the cathedral of the world.

Above all else, contemplate the windows. In the cathedral of the world there are windows without number, some long forgotten, covered with many patinas of dust, others revered by millions, the most sacred of shrines. Each in its own way is beautiful. Some are abstract, others representational; some dark and meditative, others bright and dazzling. Each tells a story about the creation of the world, the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the nature of humankind, the mystery of death. The windows of the cathedral are where the light shines in....

Fundamentalists of the right and left claim that the light shines through their window only. Skeptics can make a similar mistake, only to draw the opposite conclusion. Seeing the bewildering variety of windows and observing the folly of the worshipers, they conclude that there is not light. But the windows are not the light. The whole light -- God, Truth, call it what you will -- is beyond our perceiving. God is veiled.... Consequently, not only the world’s religions, but every ideology, every scientific worldview, every aesthetic school, has its windows in the cathedral of the world. In each the light and darkness mingle in ways that suggest meaning for those whose angle of vision is tilted in that particular direction. Attracted to the patterns of refracted light, the playing of shadows, the partial clarification of reality, these people are also worshippers; their windows too become shrines.

None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person’s window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth. Thus we can easily mistake another’s good for evil, and our own evil for good. A true, and therefore humble, universalist theology addresses this tendency, which we all share, while speaking eloquently to the overarching crisis of our times: dogmatic division in an ever more intimate, fractious, and yet interdependent world. It posits the following fundamental principles:

1. There is one Reality, one Truth, one God.

2. This Reality shines though every window in the cathedral...

3. No one can perceive it directly, the mystery being forever veiled.

4. Yet, on the cathedral floor and in the eyes of each beholder, refracted and reflected through different windows in different ways, it plays in patterns that suggest meaning, challenging us to interpret and live by the meaning as best we can.

5. Therefore, each window illumines Truth (with a large T) in a different way, leading to different truths (with a small t), and these in differing measure according to the insight and receptivity of the beholder.
*****

In his subsequent, companion chapter of Our Chosen Faith, co-author John Buehrens makes the following observation: “I have one problem with the image of ‘the cathedral of the world,’ John writes. “Within the cathedral, no one seems to be talking to anyone else.” It’s one thing to be able to appreciate the artistry of windows other than one’s own favorites, but a deep and abiding understanding of different faith traditions requires dialogue, which in turn produces new insights which become the common property of all. And this is also true for people who nominally share the same faith tradition, but whose individual experiences perhaps give them different perspectives on the same set of symbols and concepts.

Mere words will never be able to express completely the full spectrum of our collective individual experiences of the sacred, the holy, the divine. No image, graven or otherwise, can capture the awesome and terrifying magnificence of God’s countenance (assuming that God even has a countenance, or that we will ever see it face to face and live). And as Forrest also reminds us, “God is not God’s name, but our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.” We use words and pictures and metaphors and images to communicate with others our often life-changing experiences of something which is essentially invisible and unspeakable, and which often (at least at first) leaves us speechless. Yet until we find the voice to speak our truth in love, and the attentiveness to listen lovingly to the truths of others, we remain alone in our faith, isolated from the rest of the human community.

Likewise, we all know that sunshine doesn’t really go everywhere. Sometimes it’s night, sometimes it is cloudy or overcast, and there are some places where “the sun don’t shine” and where we would really rather not go, either literally or figuratively. Yet the metaphor of sunshine, which gives the world light and warmth and life, and is literally the ultimate source of everything that is (at least here in our corner of the universe) is a powerful image for describing the natural, universal, Absolute religion which is the ultimate source of enlightenment for every historical faith tradition, and remains the source of our own spiritual experience as well. There are countless varieties of plants in God’s garden, and even more in the wild, wild wood beyond our cultivation. But with fertile soil, and ample water, and just the right amount of organic compost, they all bloom under the same sunshine, and bear whatever fruit they are capable of bearing. And they all have inherent worth and value in God’s sight.

My wish for us all in this season of new beginnings is that we give ourselves the opportunity, the space, and the sunlight to bloom. And yes, we will probably need to do a little weeding and pruning, and yes we are also going to need to water and fertilize and cultivate our garden, and protect our seedlings as best we can from the unwanted nibbles of wild creatures. But this is all certainly well within our ability. By working together, side by side, communicating honestly and sharing our dreams and our collective vision, by rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands just a little dirty, the perennial seeds we plant this spring will provide us with a miraculous harvest in seasons to come, when the days once more grow shorter and darker, and sunshine seems only a distant memory.

*******

READING: (authorship unknown)


‘Twas the month after Christmas, and all through the house
Nothing would fit me, not even a blouse
The cookies I’d nibbled, things I just HAD to taste
At those holiday parties had gone straight to my waist.
When I stepped on the scales there arose such a number
That I dashed from the room! (well, less a dash than a lumber).
I recalled all the marvelous meals I’d prepared;
All the gravies and sauces and beef nicely rared,
The cakes and the pies, the bread and the cheese
And the way that I’d never said “No thank you, please.”
As I dressed myself in my husband’s old shirt
And prepared once again to do battle with dirt--
I said to myself, as only I can
“You can’t spend all winter disguised as a man!”
So -- away with the last of the sour cream dip
Get rid of the fruit cake, every cracker and chip
Every last bit of food that I crave must be banished
Till all the additional ounces have vanished.
I won’t have a cookie -- not even a lick.
I’ll want only to chew on a celery stick.
I won’t have hot biscuits, or corn bread, or pie,
I’ll munch on a carrot and quietly cry.
I’m hungry, I’m lonesome, and life is a bore--
But isn’t that what January is for?
Unable to giggle, no longer a riot.
Happy New Year to all, and to all a good diet!