a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday February 26, 2006
OPENING WORDS: “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” -- Will Rogers
READING: by Emily Dickinson
HOPE is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
***
Pope Benedict, Pat Robertson, and the Dalai Lama were waiting together backstage before the start of an ecumenical panel discussion on Spirituality, while nearby a technician was working to hook up all the equipment that would be used to broadcast the event.
“I always find it most satisfying to pray alone in my private chapel at the Vatican,” the Pope said to his companions, “on my knees with my head bowed down before the altar of God. I’ve never felt closer to Christ anywhere else.”
“I like to pray in public,” responded Pat Robertson, “standing before a large television audience with my eyes closed and my arms outstretched to heaven. It’s as if I can feel the Power of the Lord flowing out through me into the whole world.”
“I prefer to pray while sitting in the Lotus Position,” said the Dalai Lama, “so that I can feel the Divine Spirit of Enlightenment moving in and out of my body with every breath....”
At this point the cable guy could contain himself no longer. “I’m sure you fellas all know a helluva lot more about this than I do,” he interrupted, “but the best prayin’ I ever did was hanging upside-down from a telephone pole thirty feet off the ground!”
We have now arrived at the penultimate sermon in this series of sermons I’ve been preaching since the first of the year about the Theodore Parker benediction I customarily use each week to conclude our service. I love that word “penultimate” -- it’s one of those great, twenty-five cent seminary words I only get to use at times like this, and it sounds so fantastic as it rolls off the tongue, even though all it means is “just before the last.” About the only word I like better is “antepenultimate” which means “just before just before the last,” and is a terrific word for perfectionists, procrastinators, and other folks who just like to make certain that everything happens in exactly the proper order. But all I’m really saying is that after today, there is only one more sermon left in this series, next week, and after that we’ll be on to something new. So if you’ve been enjoying this series of sermons, you have one more chance to hear me wrap everything up next Sunday, while if you’ve found them a little tedious, you can start to relax because they’ll soon be over too.
But first we have today’s penultimate topic, which is “Our Ritual, Works of Love.” We all know what Love is, or at least we think we know. Love is the Doctrine of this Church. Love makes the world go round. God is Love, which means that Love is also the Quintessential, Metaphysical Creative Power of the Universe that gives us life, and gives life meaning. Yet what does it mean to perform “Works of Love?” And what does it mean to make that work our “Ritual?”
A ritual is a formal, solemn, ceremonial act or observance which takes place according to a prescribed set of rules or customary procedures. It’s a word we often hear used in connection with religious observances, especially liturgical ones. Liturgy means “the work of the people,” and much of its power comes through repetition, and our habitual familiarity with the ceremony. Ritual is something we do routinely, but which should never be allowed to become merely routine, a matter of simply going through the motions. When our rituals become simply a matter of going through the motions, they begin to lose their power -- they become empty ceremonies, rather than solemn and formal occasions.
And yet it is often when things DO become routine that they gain their greatest power, for good or ill. They become our Habits -- our distinctive “clothing” or attire: an almost instinctive second nature so closely associated with our manner of being in the world that it can seem indistinguishable from “who we are.” Force of Habit will often compel us to do things that we would never do voluntarily if we gave it a moment’s thought, yet good habits of (say) diet or exercise or dental hygiene can add years to our lives and makes us happier and more productive in the process. Human beings are creatures of habit, and easily become set in our ways. Yet the habits we choose to keep, and the habits we choose to break, can make or break our own chances for happiness, either alone or in relationship with others.
Of course, conventional wisdom also tells us that Love is Work, hard work, and that when Love becomes routine or habitual the romance is over and it’s time to move on. And yet we also know from experience that often it is ONLY when love becomes routine and habitual that it deepens and ripens and finds its fullest and most mature expression. This paradox, this apparent contradiction, resides at the very heart of love, which both gives us comfort in its comfortable and familiar habitual routine, yet never fails to surprise us with its capacity for freshness, novelty and innovation.
Here’s another thought about Love. Suppose that instead of thinking of Love as hard work, we begin to think of Love AS our Work -- the most important thing we do to give our lives meaning and value and purpose, and through which we are provided with everything we really need in order to prosper and survive. It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? Rather than thinking of life as a struggle for survival, a competition with our fellow creatures in order to acquire scarce resources for ourselves, we instead learn to see that our survival depends upon our ability to cooperate, to live in community with one another, to act empathetically and compassionately, and to share with others generously so that no one goes without.
This is the vision of the world which Love asks us to see, and then to create in its image. Sometimes it may feel as though it goes against our most basic natural instincts, although what instinct is more powerful than our instinct to love? It is also the central message of every great religious tradition of the world: to allow our Love to conquer Fear, so that we might learn to give rather than take, to share rather than accumulate, to trust rather than doubt, to hope rather than despair.
Society often encourages us to think of the Work of Love as one of “charity” -- and this is certainly an important aspect of it. The word charitas MEANS love, and is derived from the Greek word charis meaning “gift” or “grace.” In the theology of the New Testament, Charis refers to God’s loving gift of grace to human kind, for which we express our gratitude by acting charitably toward our fellow human beings. Love of God and Love of Neighbor, the one great commandment of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Charity is about sharing with others out of our abundance, which first requires that we recognize how greatly we have been blessed, and then that we generously express our gratitude for that blessing.
But Charity is only the first work of love. A generous Love is also about Creativity -- about generating something new and fresh and good and beneficial that will endure beyond us down through the generations. We all know in our heart of hearts that Love is ultimately about Creation: not just procreation (which is the most obvious outcome of an act of love); but Creativity on every level, the overflowing expressive outpouring of our passion for life which we give freely to others simply in the hope that it will give them joy.
Creativity is about Imagination: about seeing something in our mind’s eye and then making it real in the world. Creativity is the one quality we can truly say that we share with our Creator: the underlying truth behind the statement in Scripture that we were each created in the image of God.
Creativity also transforms work into play. Our daily activities are no longer experienced as a toilsome burden; they become instead an amusing entertainment, a source of fun and joy and pleasure. Love makes our burdens light, and the road before us an easy one. It puts a song in our heart and a spring in our step, and allows us to find merriment in whatever we may choose to do at the moment. Love keeps us young, like children (or at least teenagers); and yet Love also gives us a certain depth and maturity, a wisdom greater than our years. “Love is patient, love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way: it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Cor 13: 4-8).
A grateful Generosity, a benevolent Creativity, and an innocent, childlike Playfulness are not only three of the most important Works of Love, they are also three of Love’s greatest gifts to us. Love is its own best reward, and the more of it we have to give, the more we receive back in return. Love binds us together into a circle of mutual obligation and support -- a covenanted community grounded in a profound affection, appreciation, and respect for one another, each as we are, at once both flawed and wonderful.
A loving attitude teaches us when to turn a blind eye, and when to lend a helping hand; when to speak a word of encouragement, and when to hold our tongues in dignified silence. Love knows its own boundaries, which allow us each to maintain our own integrity, but Love also transforms those boundaries into places where we meet, rather than barriers that keep us apart. The Work of Love is one of healing, of compassionate nurture; and also one of inspiration, and imaginative transcendence. And when we make these Works of Love our daily Ritual: our solemn, formal customary rule and procedure, Love transforms our lives in ways we can hardly begin to imagine, and heals every illness of the soul.
And then finally, as the people of Grudgeville reminded us last week, the ultimate (or perhaps I should say “penultimate”) work of Love is Forgiveness. When we first fall in love with some one or some thing, the object of our Love -- our Beloved -- appears flawless. Love is blind (and deaf and dumb...mostly dumb, as my mother-in-law used to say, and her daughter frequently repeated to me). But as time goes by, we begin to notice our Beloved’s imperfections -- the fantasy gives way to reality, as we no longer see “as through a glass darkly,” but instead face to face. Without a highly practiced capacity to Forgive, most relationships wouldn’t last five minutes, much less fifty years.
Of course, we can always try simply overlooking our Beloved’s faults and shortcomings, by focusing our attention solely on all their admirable and desirable qualities, and ignoring all the rest. And this is probably a pretty good idea, as far as it goes. But without the ability to Forgive, blissful ignorance is eventually going to stumble over something too big to ignore. So even if your Beloved appears perfect in your eyes (and especially if they appear perfect in their own), the ability to Forgive, and to ask for forgiveness, is an essential component of keeping Love alive.
The Catholics have even made Forgiveness into a Sacrament, popularly known as “confession.” In Confession we acknowledge our failures and shortcomings to someone who loves us like no other Being can, and receive in return both forgiveness and a blessing. I’m talking about God now, and not the Priest. Mistaking the clergy for the Deity is a form of idolatry; the priest is only there to listen, and to keep you company as you stand humbly before the Almighty.
Confession makes it possible for us to receive Forgiveness, which (as we all know) is sometimes even harder than forgiving someone ourselves. Yet the willingness to be forgiven is also an essential Work of Love. Just as the humble recognition and acknowledgment of our own foibles and shortcomings makes it possible for us to look beyond the imperfections of others, it is only our willingness to accept the forgiveness of others that makes it possible for us to offer true forgiveness as well.
The blessings of true Forgiveness are many, for both the forgiven and the forgiver: greater Understanding, deeper Trust and Appreciation, and above all, renewed Hope, to name just a few. “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.” When we lose hope, when we cease to hear the wordless song at the center of our soul, we also lose our opportunity to begin again, to make a fresh start, to have a second chance. When we lose hope, we lose our ability to risk love again...which (as I’m sure you’ve all heard), has often been described as “the triumph of hope over experience.” The Work of Love is above all else the Work of Hope, and renewed Faith in the Power of our Love to make the World better.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Our Creed, All Truth
a sermon preached [extemporeaneously] by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle [and reconstructed from notes]
Sunday February 12th, 2006
I have a favorite story (which I suspect some of you have already heard, since it seems like I tell it every year about this time) about a circuit rider out in Wyoming or Montana somewhere, who struggled through a blizzard one Sunday and arrived at church only to discover that the entire congregation consisted of one old cowboy. Not sure what he should do, the preacher asked the cowboy whether he should go ahead and conduct the service.
“Well Reverend,” the cowboy replied, “if I’d made my way through a blizzard like this with a wagon full of hay, only to discover that there was only one steer, I don’t think I’d let that steer go hungry.”
Inspired, the minister climbed into the pulpit and conducted the entire service just the way he’d planned to, from Introit to Benediction. And afterwards, he asked the cowboy what he thought.
“Well Reverend,” said the cowboy, “if I’d made my way through a blizzard like this with a wagon full of hay, only to discover that there was only one steer, I don’t think I’d have fed him the whole wagonload....”
I wasn’t really certain how much of a sermon to prepare for this morning. Call me superstitious, but I just knew that if I went ahead and prepared a 2000 word manuscript like I do every other week, we would almost certainly be inundated in snow, nobody would show up, and we would end up canceling church anyway; but I also knew that if I didn’t prepare something, the storm would probably miss us entirely, (which was a very tempting hypothesis to test, except that I knew that Paula and David and Ewan were planning to be here all the way from England, and I couldn’t stand the thought of showing up entirely empty handed and trusting the Holy Spirit to inspire me on the spot). So instead I decided to compromise, and just make a few notes, and maybe afterwards if there is time we can have another “Talk-Back” like we did last Sunday.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit his past week about last Sunday’s service, and especially the conversation that took place afterwards during the “Talk-Back” about Islam and the controversial Danish cartoons that have created such a ruckus around the world. As a lot of you know, six years ago I had an opportunity to spend the spring semester in Denmark as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University, as part of a colloquium on “Interculturality and Transnationalism.” And during my time there I saw and learned a lot of things which have certainly influenced my own perspective and understanding of this current situation, and which also just so happen to be very relevant to today’s topic.
In Denmark I lived in a neighborhood which actually had a lot of Muslims living it it also . They were mostly Turks (many of whom had lived there for decades, and by that point even had adolescent children who had been born and raised in Denmark), but also a smattering of other nationalities from Africa and the Middle East, who had arrived more recently and were not especially well “assimilated.” The local Amnesty International office was just around the corner from my cozy little apartment, and I never really did figure out whether this immigrant community had grown up around that office, or rather that the Amnesty office was located there BECAUSE it was already an immigrant neighborhood....
But my barber, for example, was Turkish (and I’ll never forget how he used to trim my sideburns using a piece of string rather than a razor); as were the owners of my favorite restaurant, where I ate about once a week. It billed itself as an American restaurant, where the menu was pizza, sub sandwiches, and fried chicken...and I liked eating there because it amused me as an American to eat “American” food prepared by Turks that tasted nothing like anything I’d ever eaten in America, even though everything on the menu was familiar.
I also saw some things in Denmark that were very discouraging, and also things which gave me hope. Probably the most discouraging thing was the Bus Driver on my regular route, who I once saw speed up to avoid picking up a Muslim woman running for the bus, at the exact same stop where just the week before I had seen him wait for a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Dane. But on the encouraging side was a Train Conductor, who I saw confront two teenaged Muslim boys who had obviously been shoplifting, and had jumped on the train at the last second (with their jacket pockets just crammed full of stolen junk food) in order to make their getaway; and yet were treated with such courtesy, such firm, polite, official respect, even though it was obvious to everyone: myself, the conductor, and certainly the two kids, what was going on, and that they were “busted” and fooling no one. Yet I’ve never seen an American authority figure treat misbehaving kids like that with such courteous dignity.
But this is part of Denmark’s self image. Danes see themselves as living in a small, harmless, yet sophisticated country. They think of themselves as progressive, cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant; and yet a great deal of this self-image is also based on a sense of cultural homogeneity, which makes it difficult even for second-generation Muslims to really “fit in.” One key thing that is essential to understanding this attitude is the concept of hygge -- this “cozy intimacy” that Danes make so much of: sitting around a candle with good friends, sharing laughter and homemade food and maybe a little Aquavit.... And yet, as one (Muslim?) social commentator noted when I was there, hugge always “has its back to the world” -- the circle looks inward, to the cozy and familiar, rather than opening itself to outsiders, and extending hospitality to strangers.
This same attitude is somewhat true when it comes to Danish religion. Only about 2% of Danes actually attend the national church on a regular basis, yet the church itself is actually supported by state tax funds, and in some ways functions as an arm of the government. The church is the place where Danes go to register births, deaths, and marriages -- much like we could go to the town clerk -- but if you are Muslim, and worship at a Mosque -- where do you go when you want to record YOUR marriage or the birth of a child? This was one of the issues that was being actively discussed in Denmark when I was there six years ago, and one of the problems was that many secular, non-churchgoing Danes simply couldn’t understand why their Muslim neighbors didn’t just register at the Folkekirke like everyone else.
I think this attitude has something to do with understanding the controversy over the cartoons in Jyllands Posten, which is a conservative newspaper (by Danish standards) though still far to the left of Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. The Western Media naturally wants to frame this as a simple story full of dramatic conflict: our cherished values of Liberty and Freedom of Expression (as practiced by an enlightened, secular society) verses the Fanatical Religious Fundamentalism and parochial attitudes of a less tolerant, less enlightened culture. And then there is the Progressive Liberal alternative view, which contends that this issue is not really about Freedom of Speech at all, but rather an expression of our own Western insensitivity, intolerance, and parochialism. And of course there is also the story of how this issue has been positioned in the Islamic world, where it has become a catalyst for the expression of an even deeper cultural rage and frustration, and perhaps even been manipulated by those who would like to fan the flames of that anger higher.
But even in its simplest form, there are several conflicting progressive values at play here: both freedom of expression AND respect for the beliefs of others, along with the recognition that something can be funny to one person and also offensive to others (or even merely in poor taste), and yet still defensible in principle even though you wouldn’t want to have to defend it on its merits because you also find it objectionable. We can see hints of these same conflicts even in the First Amendment (which is where we Americans generally tend to locate our “right” to express ourselves freely). Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, but also the Free Exercise of Religion and the Right of Assembly; not to mention the separation between Church and State, and the right to peaceably “petition the government for the redress of grievances.” We are always free to protest the speech of others. Or as one Muslim put it on the radio the other day: “we all have the right to sneeze, but not in someone else’s face.”
So it seems to me that the underlying issue is really one of cultural sensitivity and a global sensibility of our interconnectedness, which brings me back to the point I was trying to make about the Danes last week. Imagine how shocking it must be when your smug, enlightened, tolerant, inoffensive world view literally blows up in your face, and people stop buying your products, and start burning down your embassies, because they don’t see the humor in something you thought was both clever and innocuous.... It must truly feel as though the world has been turned upside-down....
I guess this brings us at last to the topic of “Our Creed, All Truth.” Of course, the one persistent element of faith (in Unitarianism at least) almost from day one is that we are actually “a church without a creed.” A creed, of course, is a normative and authoritative “Statement of Belief,” which “believers” are expected to “confess” in order to become a member of the community. But Unitarian Universalists believe in a “Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning,” and therefore we organize our community around a covenant rather than a creed -- not an authoritative statement of “the Truth,” but rather a Promise to one another to be “truthful” with each other -- to be honest, to be authentic, and to walk together in the ways of faith “insofar as God has given us light to understand” them.
[Theodore Parker’s “trial”]
...But this doesn’t mean that there is no Truth, or that we each have our own “truth,” and your truth may be true for you and mine for me, and it’s all just “relative.” Rather, a creed of “All Truth” simply recognizes that none of us will ever have “The Truth” -- that there is always a different perspective, always more to learn...and that in many ways, like Socrates -- we are wise because “we know what we do not know.” Basically, it means giving up the Expectation of Certainty in exchange for developing an ability to Trust despite Ambiguity -- to believe what we believe knowing that we will never know it all, but still trusting what we know enough to act, even though we can never be certain . This is a very tricky skill, which in my experience requires us to cultivate at least three different qualities in our lives.
The first of these qualities is A Genuine Humility. I know I’ve been preaching a lot about humility recently -- it’s really become an important concept for me, so I’m sure you already know that when I say “humility” I’m NOT talking about “humiliation” -- about letting others put us “in our place” so that they can feel better about themselves, or even putting ourselves down because we may have issues about our own inherent worth. Rather, humility is simply the recognition and acceptance of our own human limitations, as well as the recognition of our more basic connection to all humanity. Humility is about Empathy -- the realization that while we not be anything special, in some ways we are ALL special, and that uniqueness needs to be honored in both ourselves and others for what it is, rather than denied or made into something it is not.
This brings us to the second important quality, which is An Authentic Curiosity. Curiosity comes in at least two flavors. The first is our natural curiosity about how things work: the desire to develop an accurate perception which leads to an understanding of how something works and how it appears from different perspectives. But then there is also an additional level of understanding concerned with the meaning of things, and our best judgment of their worth and value based on our own values of what is good, and what is worthy. Trusting ambiguity means learning how to suspend our judgment regarding something’s “worth” until we have had a chance to thoroughly explore what it is and how it works, and have seen it from a variety of different perspectives.
This brings me to the final quality, which is Listening Heart. One of the things that I have had to learn over the years is that it doesn’t really matter how smart you are or how much you may know, everyone you meet -- EVERYONE -- knows something that you don’t, and if you can just find it in your heart to keep you own mouth shut long enough to listen to what they have to say, they just might teach it to you. This is the greatest gift we can give to one another -- the gift of our own honest and authentic experience and insight, freely shared and freely accepted, without an agenda, without defensiveness, and with judgment suspended until our mutual understanding is secure.
One of the things I really love about this church, and about Unitarian Universalism in general, is how many smart, thoughtful, and genuinely insightful people you run into, each of whom has a little bit different experience and perspective of the world, and how thought provoking it can be just to sit quietly and listen to folks as they talk about where they’ve been and what they’ve done.
[Introduce Talk-Back]
at The First Religious Society in Carlisle [and reconstructed from notes]
Sunday February 12th, 2006
I have a favorite story (which I suspect some of you have already heard, since it seems like I tell it every year about this time) about a circuit rider out in Wyoming or Montana somewhere, who struggled through a blizzard one Sunday and arrived at church only to discover that the entire congregation consisted of one old cowboy. Not sure what he should do, the preacher asked the cowboy whether he should go ahead and conduct the service.
“Well Reverend,” the cowboy replied, “if I’d made my way through a blizzard like this with a wagon full of hay, only to discover that there was only one steer, I don’t think I’d let that steer go hungry.”
Inspired, the minister climbed into the pulpit and conducted the entire service just the way he’d planned to, from Introit to Benediction. And afterwards, he asked the cowboy what he thought.
“Well Reverend,” said the cowboy, “if I’d made my way through a blizzard like this with a wagon full of hay, only to discover that there was only one steer, I don’t think I’d have fed him the whole wagonload....”
I wasn’t really certain how much of a sermon to prepare for this morning. Call me superstitious, but I just knew that if I went ahead and prepared a 2000 word manuscript like I do every other week, we would almost certainly be inundated in snow, nobody would show up, and we would end up canceling church anyway; but I also knew that if I didn’t prepare something, the storm would probably miss us entirely, (which was a very tempting hypothesis to test, except that I knew that Paula and David and Ewan were planning to be here all the way from England, and I couldn’t stand the thought of showing up entirely empty handed and trusting the Holy Spirit to inspire me on the spot). So instead I decided to compromise, and just make a few notes, and maybe afterwards if there is time we can have another “Talk-Back” like we did last Sunday.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit his past week about last Sunday’s service, and especially the conversation that took place afterwards during the “Talk-Back” about Islam and the controversial Danish cartoons that have created such a ruckus around the world. As a lot of you know, six years ago I had an opportunity to spend the spring semester in Denmark as a visiting scholar at Aalborg University, as part of a colloquium on “Interculturality and Transnationalism.” And during my time there I saw and learned a lot of things which have certainly influenced my own perspective and understanding of this current situation, and which also just so happen to be very relevant to today’s topic.
In Denmark I lived in a neighborhood which actually had a lot of Muslims living it it also . They were mostly Turks (many of whom had lived there for decades, and by that point even had adolescent children who had been born and raised in Denmark), but also a smattering of other nationalities from Africa and the Middle East, who had arrived more recently and were not especially well “assimilated.” The local Amnesty International office was just around the corner from my cozy little apartment, and I never really did figure out whether this immigrant community had grown up around that office, or rather that the Amnesty office was located there BECAUSE it was already an immigrant neighborhood....
But my barber, for example, was Turkish (and I’ll never forget how he used to trim my sideburns using a piece of string rather than a razor); as were the owners of my favorite restaurant, where I ate about once a week. It billed itself as an American restaurant, where the menu was pizza, sub sandwiches, and fried chicken...and I liked eating there because it amused me as an American to eat “American” food prepared by Turks that tasted nothing like anything I’d ever eaten in America, even though everything on the menu was familiar.
I also saw some things in Denmark that were very discouraging, and also things which gave me hope. Probably the most discouraging thing was the Bus Driver on my regular route, who I once saw speed up to avoid picking up a Muslim woman running for the bus, at the exact same stop where just the week before I had seen him wait for a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Dane. But on the encouraging side was a Train Conductor, who I saw confront two teenaged Muslim boys who had obviously been shoplifting, and had jumped on the train at the last second (with their jacket pockets just crammed full of stolen junk food) in order to make their getaway; and yet were treated with such courtesy, such firm, polite, official respect, even though it was obvious to everyone: myself, the conductor, and certainly the two kids, what was going on, and that they were “busted” and fooling no one. Yet I’ve never seen an American authority figure treat misbehaving kids like that with such courteous dignity.
But this is part of Denmark’s self image. Danes see themselves as living in a small, harmless, yet sophisticated country. They think of themselves as progressive, cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant; and yet a great deal of this self-image is also based on a sense of cultural homogeneity, which makes it difficult even for second-generation Muslims to really “fit in.” One key thing that is essential to understanding this attitude is the concept of hygge -- this “cozy intimacy” that Danes make so much of: sitting around a candle with good friends, sharing laughter and homemade food and maybe a little Aquavit.... And yet, as one (Muslim?) social commentator noted when I was there, hugge always “has its back to the world” -- the circle looks inward, to the cozy and familiar, rather than opening itself to outsiders, and extending hospitality to strangers.
This same attitude is somewhat true when it comes to Danish religion. Only about 2% of Danes actually attend the national church on a regular basis, yet the church itself is actually supported by state tax funds, and in some ways functions as an arm of the government. The church is the place where Danes go to register births, deaths, and marriages -- much like we could go to the town clerk -- but if you are Muslim, and worship at a Mosque -- where do you go when you want to record YOUR marriage or the birth of a child? This was one of the issues that was being actively discussed in Denmark when I was there six years ago, and one of the problems was that many secular, non-churchgoing Danes simply couldn’t understand why their Muslim neighbors didn’t just register at the Folkekirke like everyone else.
I think this attitude has something to do with understanding the controversy over the cartoons in Jyllands Posten, which is a conservative newspaper (by Danish standards) though still far to the left of Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. The Western Media naturally wants to frame this as a simple story full of dramatic conflict: our cherished values of Liberty and Freedom of Expression (as practiced by an enlightened, secular society) verses the Fanatical Religious Fundamentalism and parochial attitudes of a less tolerant, less enlightened culture. And then there is the Progressive Liberal alternative view, which contends that this issue is not really about Freedom of Speech at all, but rather an expression of our own Western insensitivity, intolerance, and parochialism. And of course there is also the story of how this issue has been positioned in the Islamic world, where it has become a catalyst for the expression of an even deeper cultural rage and frustration, and perhaps even been manipulated by those who would like to fan the flames of that anger higher.
But even in its simplest form, there are several conflicting progressive values at play here: both freedom of expression AND respect for the beliefs of others, along with the recognition that something can be funny to one person and also offensive to others (or even merely in poor taste), and yet still defensible in principle even though you wouldn’t want to have to defend it on its merits because you also find it objectionable. We can see hints of these same conflicts even in the First Amendment (which is where we Americans generally tend to locate our “right” to express ourselves freely). Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, but also the Free Exercise of Religion and the Right of Assembly; not to mention the separation between Church and State, and the right to peaceably “petition the government for the redress of grievances.” We are always free to protest the speech of others. Or as one Muslim put it on the radio the other day: “we all have the right to sneeze, but not in someone else’s face.”
So it seems to me that the underlying issue is really one of cultural sensitivity and a global sensibility of our interconnectedness, which brings me back to the point I was trying to make about the Danes last week. Imagine how shocking it must be when your smug, enlightened, tolerant, inoffensive world view literally blows up in your face, and people stop buying your products, and start burning down your embassies, because they don’t see the humor in something you thought was both clever and innocuous.... It must truly feel as though the world has been turned upside-down....
I guess this brings us at last to the topic of “Our Creed, All Truth.” Of course, the one persistent element of faith (in Unitarianism at least) almost from day one is that we are actually “a church without a creed.” A creed, of course, is a normative and authoritative “Statement of Belief,” which “believers” are expected to “confess” in order to become a member of the community. But Unitarian Universalists believe in a “Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning,” and therefore we organize our community around a covenant rather than a creed -- not an authoritative statement of “the Truth,” but rather a Promise to one another to be “truthful” with each other -- to be honest, to be authentic, and to walk together in the ways of faith “insofar as God has given us light to understand” them.
[Theodore Parker’s “trial”]
...But this doesn’t mean that there is no Truth, or that we each have our own “truth,” and your truth may be true for you and mine for me, and it’s all just “relative.” Rather, a creed of “All Truth” simply recognizes that none of us will ever have “The Truth” -- that there is always a different perspective, always more to learn...and that in many ways, like Socrates -- we are wise because “we know what we do not know.” Basically, it means giving up the Expectation of Certainty in exchange for developing an ability to Trust despite Ambiguity -- to believe what we believe knowing that we will never know it all, but still trusting what we know enough to act, even though we can never be certain . This is a very tricky skill, which in my experience requires us to cultivate at least three different qualities in our lives.
The first of these qualities is A Genuine Humility. I know I’ve been preaching a lot about humility recently -- it’s really become an important concept for me, so I’m sure you already know that when I say “humility” I’m NOT talking about “humiliation” -- about letting others put us “in our place” so that they can feel better about themselves, or even putting ourselves down because we may have issues about our own inherent worth. Rather, humility is simply the recognition and acceptance of our own human limitations, as well as the recognition of our more basic connection to all humanity. Humility is about Empathy -- the realization that while we not be anything special, in some ways we are ALL special, and that uniqueness needs to be honored in both ourselves and others for what it is, rather than denied or made into something it is not.
This brings us to the second important quality, which is An Authentic Curiosity. Curiosity comes in at least two flavors. The first is our natural curiosity about how things work: the desire to develop an accurate perception which leads to an understanding of how something works and how it appears from different perspectives. But then there is also an additional level of understanding concerned with the meaning of things, and our best judgment of their worth and value based on our own values of what is good, and what is worthy. Trusting ambiguity means learning how to suspend our judgment regarding something’s “worth” until we have had a chance to thoroughly explore what it is and how it works, and have seen it from a variety of different perspectives.
This brings me to the final quality, which is Listening Heart. One of the things that I have had to learn over the years is that it doesn’t really matter how smart you are or how much you may know, everyone you meet -- EVERYONE -- knows something that you don’t, and if you can just find it in your heart to keep you own mouth shut long enough to listen to what they have to say, they just might teach it to you. This is the greatest gift we can give to one another -- the gift of our own honest and authentic experience and insight, freely shared and freely accepted, without an agenda, without defensiveness, and with judgment suspended until our mutual understanding is secure.
One of the things I really love about this church, and about Unitarian Universalism in general, is how many smart, thoughtful, and genuinely insightful people you run into, each of whom has a little bit different experience and perspective of the world, and how thought provoking it can be just to sit quietly and listen to folks as they talk about where they’ve been and what they’ve done.
[Introduce Talk-Back]
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Our Shrine, The Good Heart
sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday February 5th, 2006
Opening Words - Andrew C. Kennedy
We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out --
Both backward into history
and forward into the future --
To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.
READING: Luke 12: 13-34
A Baptist youth minister was trying to explain to his Sunday School class the significance of Christ’s teachings on Christian charity.
"If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale, and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into heaven?" he asked.
"NO!" the children all answered.
"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into heaven?"
"NO!" they all answered again.
"Well, then, what if I were kind to animals and gave candy to all the children and loved my wife, would that get me into heaven?" he asked them again.
Once more they all answered, "NO!"
"All right," he continued, thinking they were a good bit more theologically sophisticated than he had given them credit for, "then how CAN I get into heaven?"
A five-year-old boy shouted out, "You gotta be DEAD!"
Today’s sermon is the second in a series of sermons based on the words of Theodore Parker that I use each Sunday as a benediction to close the service. Last week I started out by talking about the idea of shared ministry, and the process that we each go through in order to discern our own unique vocation or “calling” to serve a higher purpose, regardless of the anxiety we may feel about our ability to meet the many challenges we see all around us, and the very real possibility that we might fail to meet them. And now today I want to continue with this theme for awhile, by talking a little more about the idea of courage, or “the good heart.”
Courage comes from the heart, you know. That’s pretty much what the word means in French. Courage is literally the act of facing something that you know is dangerous, rather than running away from it, because the Love in your heart has overcome the Fear you are feeling other places in your body. When our courage fails us, we are said to “lose heart” and become discouraged, at which point we need for the people around us to encourage us to “take heart” again, and to swallow our fears so that we might once more face the danger and defeat it.
And then there is also always the risk of becoming “broken hearted” -- of growing so disillusioned and disappointed by the apparent heartlessness of the world that we lose hope entirely, because our heart simply isn’t in it any more, and we can’t seem to find the heart to keep trying any longer.
But here’s the real heart of the matter. The heart is at the center. And the things we take TO heart -- the things we learn to value, the things we find worthy -- are what give our lives value, and make life itself good, and worthwhile. “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” We grow to love the things we treasure most. But the opposite is also be true. When we find the courage to follow our hearts, we eventually discover a richness in life more precious than anything else we have known before. We find it first within us, and then we learn to see it all around us. And the more we are able to share it, to give it away, the more valuable it becomes.
That’s basically my entire message for this morning. But we still have a little time left, so let me amplify it a bit. A shrine is generally thought of as a holy place of devotion and veneration. Shrines often house some sort of relic, like the bones of a saint or some other sanctified artifact, and are destinations for pilgrims, who travel great distances in order to be blessed or healed there. So when Theodore Parker characterized “the good heart” as the “shrine” of our religion, in effect he was saying that the sacred object of our veneration should not be a relic of the past, the ossified vestiges of some long-dead saint, but rather that we should seek our blessing by looking inward, and by finding the courage to follow what we find there -- the heartfelt wisdom of our own good hearts -- devoting our lives to the values we treasure most, and through which we hope to heal both ourselves and the world. Parker looked to the future rather than to the past; to Hope rather than Memory. Our lives become temples of the Spirit of God in the world, and through our service we bring to life the power of God’s Love.
You know, there are two fundamental truths about life which seem so obvious that they hardly seem worth mentioning, but which are likewise so routinely ignored that we should all probably repeat them out loud to ourselves daily. The first truth is that there is no Growth without Change. Or to put it another way, if you want things to be different, you need to learn to do things differently. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? And the second truth is like unto it: there is no Change without Struggle, or perhaps even a little Conflict. If you want to get traction, then there needs to be some friction; otherwise, you just end up spinning your wheels and going nowhere. Life is a struggle. Even when things seem to be going smoothly, it’s probably just because we’ve been coasting for awhile. If we want to make real progress, we generally need to push a little; we can’t just let ourselves keep sliding downhill forever.
Of course, we also often find ourselves struggling to avoid change, or even for there to be plenty of change without progress, without growth. People run themselves around in circles all the time -- motion without movement, activity without accomplishment. In order for us to feel confident that our activities have meaning, we also need to keep the big picture in view. We need to have a vision, we need to set a direction, we need to make goals. If we DON’T know where we’re going, that’s probably where we’ll end up: lost, misguided, directionless.
Obviously, it’s important from time to time just to listen the heart, and then to follow wherever it may lead, however much the path may seem to twist and meander. But at some point, it’s not enough just to listen -- one also needs to respond to what one has heard. And as I said last week, that calling, that vocation to serve something larger than ourselves, is ministry: a ministry which we learn to share when we congregate together as members of a community of faith. So, head in the clouds and feet on the ground, eyes on the prize (or at least on the horizon), as we listen faithfully to our hearts, and learn to put one foot in front of the other while struggling forward along a difficult and often treacherous path...this is what pilgrims do for a living. It’s not a contest, or a race (although I suppose you could think of it as a career) -- but it is without question an act of faith, and therefore a matter of learning to trust.
Saint Augustine once famously described faith as “a belief in things unseen,” which for many of us (who possess a modern, scientific worldview) has evolved into (and then been dismissed as) “a belief in things we know aren’t true.” But faith, fidelity, is a lot more about trust than it is belief. Or once again, to put it another way, it’s about believing (and trusting) the evidence of our hearts as WELL as the evidence of our senses, not in spite of it. Believing what our hearts want to be true when our own eyes tell us otherwise isn’t faith, it’s wishful thinking. But learning to trust the wisdom of our hearts can also often prevent us from being deceived by mere appearances, and empower us to see past the superficial to the true heart of the subject.
Faith is also an act of creative imagination: the power to envision things we now see only in our mind’s eye, and then make them vivid so that others can see them as well. When we speak from the heart about our dreams, we sometimes run the risk of being ridiculed -- but in the company of other good-hearted people, our dreams are nurtured and encouraged, and perhaps even come to life. The difficult process of giving birth to a common vision, and a shared dream, can often seem like something that is ONLY truly possible in the company of good-hearted people, who not only trust one another, but can also communicate, compromise, and then collaborate together in order to create a common purpose.
A senior colleague of mine once defined Collaboration as “an unnatural act between consenting adults.” It’s not always easy to set aside our individual dreams, desires, tastes, preferences, habitual practices and heart-felt ambitions in order to cooperate with others in a shared enterprise. It’s not always easy to surrender control, and to sacrifice the authority to make our own decisions, in order to forge a common purpose. We all have our own vision of what we would like the future to be. Sometimes those visions overlap, sometimes they run in parallel, sometimes they work at cross-purposes, or perhaps even are in direct conflict with one another...but we never really notice until we try to work together, and discover that our lack of agreement is more than just a failure to communicate. Without a shared vision and shared goals, our efforts to all pull together can easily degenerate into a tug-of-war, in which strong-willed individuals constantly attempt to pull the group more in the direction of their own vision, under the pretext of providing “leadership.”
But the real challenge of leadership is not about figuring out how to pull harder than anyone else, so that your will controls the direction of the group. Rather, a good leader is someone who can speak from the heart to the hearts of others, and encourage them to keep the big picture in view. A good leader forces people to question the privileged status of their own assumptions, and to listen thoughtfully to the expectations and assumptions of others.
Good leadership is about helping a group of individuals become a team, all pulling together toward a goal they all share, and which each member of the team feels like they own as if it were their own, and they had thought it up themselves. Which, of course, they did, thanks to the help of their leader, who also listened carefully to what they had to say, and then tried to articulate it in such a way that everyone who wished to be on the team could get behind it and help move it along.
And yet good leaders also need to maintain a certain “critical distance,” which allows them to remain somewhat objective and above the struggle, capable of differentiating between their own desires and what is best for the group. This is perhaps the greatest challenge all good leaders face: to motivate and not manipulate; to inspire without misleading, or abusing their authority and influence; to tell people what they truly need to hear rather than merely what they want to hear; and to maintain that crucial “critical distance” without appearing either too distant, or too critical.
Good leaders don’t impose their will on others. Rather, they point to the horizon, and invite the people to lift up their eyes and see the big picture; to take a good, hard look at who they are, and where it is they want to go.
In the thirteenth stanza of The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayam wrote: “Look within,” whispers the rose. “Open your consciousness to soul-understanding, ere the petals of our life fall and scatter on the garden path -- lovely no longer, but shriveled, lifeless -- brown.” Look within, and open your consciousness, to the understanding of the heart.
###
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday February 5th, 2006
Opening Words - Andrew C. Kennedy
We come to love a church,
the traditions, the history,
and especially the people associated with it.
And through these people,
young and old,
known and unknown,
we reach out --
Both backward into history
and forward into the future --
To link together the generations
in this imperfect, but blessed community
of memory and hope.
READING: Luke 12: 13-34
A Baptist youth minister was trying to explain to his Sunday School class the significance of Christ’s teachings on Christian charity.
"If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale, and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into heaven?" he asked.
"NO!" the children all answered.
"If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into heaven?"
"NO!" they all answered again.
"Well, then, what if I were kind to animals and gave candy to all the children and loved my wife, would that get me into heaven?" he asked them again.
Once more they all answered, "NO!"
"All right," he continued, thinking they were a good bit more theologically sophisticated than he had given them credit for, "then how CAN I get into heaven?"
A five-year-old boy shouted out, "You gotta be DEAD!"
Today’s sermon is the second in a series of sermons based on the words of Theodore Parker that I use each Sunday as a benediction to close the service. Last week I started out by talking about the idea of shared ministry, and the process that we each go through in order to discern our own unique vocation or “calling” to serve a higher purpose, regardless of the anxiety we may feel about our ability to meet the many challenges we see all around us, and the very real possibility that we might fail to meet them. And now today I want to continue with this theme for awhile, by talking a little more about the idea of courage, or “the good heart.”
Courage comes from the heart, you know. That’s pretty much what the word means in French. Courage is literally the act of facing something that you know is dangerous, rather than running away from it, because the Love in your heart has overcome the Fear you are feeling other places in your body. When our courage fails us, we are said to “lose heart” and become discouraged, at which point we need for the people around us to encourage us to “take heart” again, and to swallow our fears so that we might once more face the danger and defeat it.
And then there is also always the risk of becoming “broken hearted” -- of growing so disillusioned and disappointed by the apparent heartlessness of the world that we lose hope entirely, because our heart simply isn’t in it any more, and we can’t seem to find the heart to keep trying any longer.
But here’s the real heart of the matter. The heart is at the center. And the things we take TO heart -- the things we learn to value, the things we find worthy -- are what give our lives value, and make life itself good, and worthwhile. “Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.” We grow to love the things we treasure most. But the opposite is also be true. When we find the courage to follow our hearts, we eventually discover a richness in life more precious than anything else we have known before. We find it first within us, and then we learn to see it all around us. And the more we are able to share it, to give it away, the more valuable it becomes.
That’s basically my entire message for this morning. But we still have a little time left, so let me amplify it a bit. A shrine is generally thought of as a holy place of devotion and veneration. Shrines often house some sort of relic, like the bones of a saint or some other sanctified artifact, and are destinations for pilgrims, who travel great distances in order to be blessed or healed there. So when Theodore Parker characterized “the good heart” as the “shrine” of our religion, in effect he was saying that the sacred object of our veneration should not be a relic of the past, the ossified vestiges of some long-dead saint, but rather that we should seek our blessing by looking inward, and by finding the courage to follow what we find there -- the heartfelt wisdom of our own good hearts -- devoting our lives to the values we treasure most, and through which we hope to heal both ourselves and the world. Parker looked to the future rather than to the past; to Hope rather than Memory. Our lives become temples of the Spirit of God in the world, and through our service we bring to life the power of God’s Love.
You know, there are two fundamental truths about life which seem so obvious that they hardly seem worth mentioning, but which are likewise so routinely ignored that we should all probably repeat them out loud to ourselves daily. The first truth is that there is no Growth without Change. Or to put it another way, if you want things to be different, you need to learn to do things differently. That seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? And the second truth is like unto it: there is no Change without Struggle, or perhaps even a little Conflict. If you want to get traction, then there needs to be some friction; otherwise, you just end up spinning your wheels and going nowhere. Life is a struggle. Even when things seem to be going smoothly, it’s probably just because we’ve been coasting for awhile. If we want to make real progress, we generally need to push a little; we can’t just let ourselves keep sliding downhill forever.
Of course, we also often find ourselves struggling to avoid change, or even for there to be plenty of change without progress, without growth. People run themselves around in circles all the time -- motion without movement, activity without accomplishment. In order for us to feel confident that our activities have meaning, we also need to keep the big picture in view. We need to have a vision, we need to set a direction, we need to make goals. If we DON’T know where we’re going, that’s probably where we’ll end up: lost, misguided, directionless.
Obviously, it’s important from time to time just to listen the heart, and then to follow wherever it may lead, however much the path may seem to twist and meander. But at some point, it’s not enough just to listen -- one also needs to respond to what one has heard. And as I said last week, that calling, that vocation to serve something larger than ourselves, is ministry: a ministry which we learn to share when we congregate together as members of a community of faith. So, head in the clouds and feet on the ground, eyes on the prize (or at least on the horizon), as we listen faithfully to our hearts, and learn to put one foot in front of the other while struggling forward along a difficult and often treacherous path...this is what pilgrims do for a living. It’s not a contest, or a race (although I suppose you could think of it as a career) -- but it is without question an act of faith, and therefore a matter of learning to trust.
Saint Augustine once famously described faith as “a belief in things unseen,” which for many of us (who possess a modern, scientific worldview) has evolved into (and then been dismissed as) “a belief in things we know aren’t true.” But faith, fidelity, is a lot more about trust than it is belief. Or once again, to put it another way, it’s about believing (and trusting) the evidence of our hearts as WELL as the evidence of our senses, not in spite of it. Believing what our hearts want to be true when our own eyes tell us otherwise isn’t faith, it’s wishful thinking. But learning to trust the wisdom of our hearts can also often prevent us from being deceived by mere appearances, and empower us to see past the superficial to the true heart of the subject.
Faith is also an act of creative imagination: the power to envision things we now see only in our mind’s eye, and then make them vivid so that others can see them as well. When we speak from the heart about our dreams, we sometimes run the risk of being ridiculed -- but in the company of other good-hearted people, our dreams are nurtured and encouraged, and perhaps even come to life. The difficult process of giving birth to a common vision, and a shared dream, can often seem like something that is ONLY truly possible in the company of good-hearted people, who not only trust one another, but can also communicate, compromise, and then collaborate together in order to create a common purpose.
A senior colleague of mine once defined Collaboration as “an unnatural act between consenting adults.” It’s not always easy to set aside our individual dreams, desires, tastes, preferences, habitual practices and heart-felt ambitions in order to cooperate with others in a shared enterprise. It’s not always easy to surrender control, and to sacrifice the authority to make our own decisions, in order to forge a common purpose. We all have our own vision of what we would like the future to be. Sometimes those visions overlap, sometimes they run in parallel, sometimes they work at cross-purposes, or perhaps even are in direct conflict with one another...but we never really notice until we try to work together, and discover that our lack of agreement is more than just a failure to communicate. Without a shared vision and shared goals, our efforts to all pull together can easily degenerate into a tug-of-war, in which strong-willed individuals constantly attempt to pull the group more in the direction of their own vision, under the pretext of providing “leadership.”
But the real challenge of leadership is not about figuring out how to pull harder than anyone else, so that your will controls the direction of the group. Rather, a good leader is someone who can speak from the heart to the hearts of others, and encourage them to keep the big picture in view. A good leader forces people to question the privileged status of their own assumptions, and to listen thoughtfully to the expectations and assumptions of others.
Good leadership is about helping a group of individuals become a team, all pulling together toward a goal they all share, and which each member of the team feels like they own as if it were their own, and they had thought it up themselves. Which, of course, they did, thanks to the help of their leader, who also listened carefully to what they had to say, and then tried to articulate it in such a way that everyone who wished to be on the team could get behind it and help move it along.
And yet good leaders also need to maintain a certain “critical distance,” which allows them to remain somewhat objective and above the struggle, capable of differentiating between their own desires and what is best for the group. This is perhaps the greatest challenge all good leaders face: to motivate and not manipulate; to inspire without misleading, or abusing their authority and influence; to tell people what they truly need to hear rather than merely what they want to hear; and to maintain that crucial “critical distance” without appearing either too distant, or too critical.
Good leaders don’t impose their will on others. Rather, they point to the horizon, and invite the people to lift up their eyes and see the big picture; to take a good, hard look at who they are, and where it is they want to go.
In the thirteenth stanza of The Rubaiyat, Omar Khayam wrote: “Look within,” whispers the rose. “Open your consciousness to soul-understanding, ere the petals of our life fall and scatter on the garden path -- lovely no longer, but shriveled, lifeless -- brown.” Look within, and open your consciousness, to the understanding of the heart.
###
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