a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle
Sunday September 24, 2006 [Rosh Hashanah, 5767]
Where is the Dwelling Place of God?
God Dwells wherever we will let God in.
This is the Ultimate Purpose: to let God in. But we can let God in only where we really stand, where we live, where we have a true life. If we maintain holy [conversation] with the little world entrusted to us, if we help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of Creation in which we are living, then we are establishing, in this our place, a dwelling for the Divine Presence --Martin Buber
I thought I’d start out on just a slightly more academic note than I usually do , just so I can create a little bit of context for some things I want to say later on. But first I want to make it clear that by “academic” I don’t mean “irrelevant;” I simply mean that I’m going to talk briefly about some topics that don’t normally get much discussion outside of a classroom. And by “slightly” I mean that what you are about to hear does contain some pretty broad generalizations, and that in no way will there be anything even slightly resembling a midterm....
But consider for a moment that, despite their obvious differences, the three major “Abrahamic” faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are all basically variations on a single theme -- the theme of Radical Monotheism, which declares that God is ONE and everything in heaven and on earth is under God’s dominion.
Islam is the “youngest” and most recent of these faith traditions to emerge, but in many ways it is also still the most foreign to Americans, and also the most “traditional” (or at least least modern) of the three, which is to say that it has been the least influenced by the secular philosophy of post-Enlightenment European Modernism, and more recently the relativistic philosophy of 20th century postmodern Structuralist/ Deconstructionist critical “theory.” God is still sovereign in the Muslim world; the word Islam itself means simply “to submit,” which makes a Muslim someone who willingly submits to the will and the word of Allah.
Christianity, on the other hand, is probably the most innovative (which is to say, the most derivative) of the three faith traditions. Christians have “borrowed” freely and without apology from every culture they have ever encountered, and have assimilated those beliefs into the “One True Faith” simply by claiming the ideas of other cultures as their own. As a result, Christianity is at once both the most diverse and historically the most contentious of the three faith traditions; and in effect invented the ideas of Toleration and Secularism simply to put an end to centuries of theologically-inspired religious warfare.
From the destruction of Herod’s temple (in the year 3830), to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 of the Common Era, (and in reality for even longer and still today) Judaism has been a religion of the Diaspora, a civilization in exile, confronted by the challenge of maintaining the integrity of it’s own cultural traditions while surviving within a surrounding dominant culture, and balancing the pressure to assimilate with the need to get along. Judaism’s view of pluralism is not a question of learning to practice tolerance, but rather the experience of being “the Other,” and subject to either benign neglect or outright extermination depending upon the whims of their more powerful neighbors.
All three faith traditions understand the Hebrew Bible as “Scripture,” although for each tradition that understanding means something a little different. And all three religions also have additional religious writings that are uniquely their own. For Muslims, the Qu’ran is understood to have been recited by Muhammad, in Arabic, in precisely the exact same words that God had the angel Gabriel place into his mouth. It is God’s final and most perfect revelation to humanity, and therefore the words themselves are Holy, not even to be translated into other languages.
Christianity created a “New” Testament to compliment the scriptures it had inherited from Judaism, and although in historical terms both text and canon are clearly the product of human agency, there are many Fundamentalist Christians today who also subscribe to the doctrines of literal verbal inspiration, and textual inerrancy -- essentially that the Bible was dictated word for word into the ears of its various authors exactly the way God wanted it to be, and is without mistake in either fact or doctrine.
Judaism, however, created the Talmud -- a collection of oral tradition and Rabbinic commentary on the Torah, which describes, explains (and often debates the meaning of) the traditional 613 commandments or mitzvot which stand at the heart of Jewish Law, or halakhah. Devotional practices like keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, even the study of Scripture and the Talmud itself, are all part of halakhah -- which means literally to “walk,” as in “to walk with God.”
Which brings me at long last to the subject of Prayer. Within Islam, prayer is one of the five pillars of the faith -- it is a highly physical, corporate and communal act which takes place at fixed intervals five times daily. Christianity, as you might expect, has a very eclectic view of prayer: there are rote devotional prayers like the Rosary, well-rehersed public prayers in churches and on other “ceremonial” occasions, including the familiar “Lord’s Prayer” attributed to Jesus himself; and, of course, a rich tradition of private and spontaneous prayer, silent prayer, contemplative prayer and meditation...which also go back to New Testament admonitions attributed to Jesus about going into one’s closet to pray, and avoiding ostentatious prayers which draw unwarranted attention to the one who is praying, rather than focusing attention upon the One [God] being prayed to....
The role of prayer in Judaism in some ways resembles the practices of Christianity and Islam, but in others goes far beyond them. When I was living on Nantucket, the congregation I served there shared its building with a seasonal synagogue. Every spring, when the Unitarians moved upstairs into the large, (and largely unheated) 400 seat 19th-century sanctuary, the members of Congregation Shirat Ha Yam would move into the much more intimate downstairs quarters of Hendrix Hall, where they held their Friday evening Shabbat services all summer long. Until, of course, the ten days which come each year right around now, when the two congregations would swap accommodations, so that the members of the synagogue might celebrate the Jewish High Holy days -- Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kipper, and the “Days of Awe” which fall between them -- in a space large enough to comfortably accommodate all of the Jews on the island. And I still have vivid memories of Rabbi Rachel Sabbath (isn’t that a great name for a Rabbi?) blowing her Shofar (in the middle of my sermon) in order to summon her people to repentance, so that they might be prepared to atone for their sins of the past year on Yom Kippur, asking forgiveness both of God and of one another, and thus beginning the New Year not only with a closed book, but also a clean slate.
The centrality of prayer in the Jewish tradition is profound. For an observant Jew, prayer is constant practice interwoven into their daily routine -- an on-going reminder of God’s presence in the world, and in life itself, even during the most ordinary activities of everyday living. Jewish prayers basically fall into three categories. There are prayers of Adoration or Blessing, which are essentially expressions of wonder and amazement at the Creator’s generosity toward us all. There are prayers of Thanksgiving and Confession, which acknowledge our Gratitude and our own fundamental unworthiness to receive the blessings God has given. And then there are Prayers of Petition, which essentially ask God for a favor.
Yet even these categories don’t really begin to describe the profound role that prayer potentially plays in the life of a truly observant Jew. There are prayers for before one gets out of bed in the morning, thanking God for returning the soul to the body, and prayers for when one retires to bed at night; prayers to recite before performing any mitzvah (such as lighting a candle or washing your hands) or enjoying any material pleasure; prayers for all sorts of special or unusual occasions and occurrences; formal prayers to be recited at services; or before and after meals; literally, prayers for almost every kind of situation you can think of. And the point is NOT that Jews can’t get through a day without praying. The point of prayer in the Jewish tradition is to cultivate an introspective awareness of one’s role in the universe and one’s relationship with God, so that one is constantly mindful of that role, and that relationship, in everything one does.
This principle of “mindfulness” or kavvanah (which is sometimes also translated as “concentration” or “intent”) is essential to creating an effective attitude of prayer. Without it, one is merely going through the motions and mouthing the words...reciting rather than really praying. The basic awareness that one is talking to God, that one intends to pray and has cleared one’s mind of other thoughts and distractions, is what keeps routine prayer authentic rather than empty and hollow.
Spirituality is a profound thing, but it can (and should be) also a very simple and mundane thing. We often think of “spiritual” time as time set aside from other, more worldly things. It may be as simple as time spent sitting in a circle around a candle reading poetry aloud, or lying silently on one’s back in a meadow looking up at the sky; but still it is time set aside from the “real world” to focus on spiritual things. But a discipline of prayer which acknowledges the sacred in every daily and mundane activity we experience reminds us of the constant presence of the spiritual in our lives in a way that is difficult to replicate through any other practice.
This brings me to the next point I want to make about prayer, which is the importance of regular practice itself. Prayer, (or any form of worship, really), is a skill or an ability which one can learn and improve through practice. If you’re not satisfied with your own spiritual life, if you tend to feel more frustrated than inspired by your attempts to pray, or your experience of worship in general, it’s probably because you aren’t doing it often enough. [As we heard in our reading], learning how to pray effectively is like learning a musical instrument or going to the gym. The desired outcome often depends less on the quality of the experience than the consistency of one’s participation: I don’t care how good your personal trainer is, if you’re only working out once a month (rather than daily, or even three times a week) you aren’t going to experience very good results. So why should we think that our spiritual lives are any different?
The Talmud teaches that when we ask God for a favor, we need to keep our expectations reasonable. Pray for wisdom, pray for courage, pray for guidance or patience or fortitude -- and, if you must, pray for a miracle, knowing that miracles are few and far between. But don’t pray for something that is well within your own reach, and then blame God when your prayers are answered only with silence. Make the effort. Overcome your frustrations. Judaism teaches us all to Praise the Creator of the Universe for the blessings we have already received, and to Give Thanks for having received them despite our own unworthiness. And maybe then our other prayers will be answered with something more than silence.
This brings me to the last thing I want to talk about today, which is the language of prayer, and the challenge of learning to Pray Out Loud. The Talmud teaches that one may pray in any language they understand, but many Jews feel that it is preferable to pray in Hebrew, since “Hebrew is the language of Jewish though.” Muslims, of course, pray only in Arabic; and I know of many Catholics who still miss the Latin Mass. There’s a wonderful Hassidic story about an unlettered man who wanted to pray in Hebrew, but did not know the language. So he went to the Shul and recited over and over again the only Hebrew he knew: the Hebrew alphabet. When the Rabbi asked him what he was doing, the man replied: “The Holy One, Blessed is He, knows what is in my heart. I will give Him the letters, and He can put the words together.”
For my own part, I have often wondered in the past whether it was possible to pray without words -- knowing that God knows what is in my heart even before I do. Having grown up a Unitarian, which (like many faith traditions produced by the Radical Reformation, tends to be highly individualistic and favors personal piety over public performance) I tend to prefer private, silent, contemplative prayers, along with practices like meditation and journal writing; and am by nature a little skeptical of the entire idea of prayer to begin with, especially sanctimonious and overly ceremonial group prayer on public occasions, which I’ve so often seen abused as a instrument of imposed conformity and social control.
When I was serving our congregation in Midland Texas, we competed in an ecumenical church basketball league against all the other congregations in town: Baptists and Methodists and Roman Catholics... congregations which often had their own gyms, as well as thousands of members from which to draw players to form multiple teams of various levels of skill. At age 32, I was the youngest player on our squad of eight...and possibly the most athletic as well, so you can just imagine what it was like to try to keep up with our opponents. And there was always that awkward moment, right before tip-off, when the referee would gather both teams at center court, and invite someone to lead the entire group in prayer. Generally we Unitarians all looked at our shoes until someone from the other side spoke up; until that one fateful night when the referee asked specifically whether our team, as visitors there in the “Gym of the Lord,” would like to offer the prayer that evening, and of course all of my teammates looked directly at me....
Now obviously, as a minister, I’d prayed out loud in public before... generally in church, with a script, and a nice long “moment of silence” in my hip pocket to finish things off; or perhaps a brief table grace I had memorized, or something else I had written out in advance. But this was different. This was crunch time. And so we all clasped hands there at center court, Unitarians and Baptists alike; and I prayed. I just said out loud what I was feeling in my heart about what I thought we all needed to hear while standing there in the the Gym of the Lord, in the presence of the Spirit of Creation itself. I took my time and didn’t hurry or go searching for fancy language or turns of phrase; and pretty soon I was finished, and it was over... and I could tell that the ref in particular had been moved by my prayer, because afterwards I noticed him nodding in agreement, and EVERY questionable call that night went our way, and I made it all the way to the fourth quarter before finally fouling out.
It still wasn’t enough for us to win, but it was the start of a big change in my life, because from that day forward I made up my mind that I would no longer be afraid to pray out lout, and that whenever I was asked unexpectedly to pray in public, I would simply take a moment to center myself, to connect as best I could with all the people around me, to focus my attention on the real presence of the Spirit of God... and to say out loud what I was feeling in my heart, without hurrying or searching for the perfect words, in the hope that whatever I had to say would somehow be heard by whoever needed to hear it....
It’s a practice I heartily recommend to all of you as well....
Pray with me now, won’t you?
Mysterious Source of all that is.
We come here today with humble, grateful hearts...
Hoping to have them filled with hope...
Hoping to have them filled with love...
Hoping to have them filled with the Spirit of Life itself,
that creative spirit through which all things are made new.
Teach us how to open our hearts, that they might be filled with a wisdom that surpasses the wisdom of the world, and a peace that passes understanding itself....
Amen. And Blessed Be.
READING: “The Need for Prayer”
by Tracey R Rich (Judaism 101 www.jewfaq.org)
Many people today do not see the need for regular, formal prayer. "I pray when I feel inspired to, when it is meaningful to me," they say. This attitude overlooks two important things: the purpose of prayer, and the need for practice.
One purpose of prayer is to increase your awareness of G-d in your life and the role that G-d plays in your life. If you only pray when you feel inspired (that is, when you are already aware of G-d), then you will not increase your awareness of G-d.
In addition, if you want to do something well, you have to practice it continually, even when you don't feel like doing it. This is as true of prayer as it is of playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, or writing. The sense of humility and awe of G-d that is essential to proper prayer does not come easily to modern man, and will not simply come to you when you feel the need to pray. If you wait until inspiration strikes, you will not have the skills you need to pray effectively. Before I started praying regularly, I found that when I wanted to pray, I didn't know how. I didn't know what to say, or how to say it, or how to establish the proper frame of mind. If you pray regularly, you will learn how to express yourself in prayer.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Sunday, September 17, 2006
THE BREATHTAKING EMPTY SPACE OF AN OPEN DOOR
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 17, 2006
I thought I’d begin my message this morning by sharing with you all an embarrassing story about myself, just so you’ll all know just how monk-like I can let myself get sometimes. And by “monk-like” I mean Adrian Monk, not Thomas Merton or Saint Francis of Assisi. But last Sunday I made a comment about how the title of my sermon should really have been “A Few Plain, Simple Truths about the Most Important Thing in the Universe (part 438).” The purpose of that apparently “off-hand” remark was to indicate that Yes, I have been doing this for quite a long time now, and Yes, I do tend to repeat myself frequently; and also to foreshadow the fact that a little later on in my sermon I was planning to quote at some length from the message I’d presented five years earlier to my congregation on Nantucket on the Sunday following September 11th. Because I want you to know that even though I very work hard to make it sound like I’m just standing up here sharing a bunch of random thoughts with a room full of my closest friends, these sermons are actually subtle and carefully-crafted works of literary composition. (Just don’t ruin the illusion by letting anybody else in on the secret, OK?)
But that number -- 438 -- was basically just something I’d pulled out of the air, after doing a few quick calculations on my fingers. And afterwards, it started to bother me a little (as somebody with a PhD in history from a University which, by the skin of their teeth, still has a top-25 ranked football team) that I actually didn’t know how many sermons I’ve preached in my lifetime....or how many weddings I’ve performed, how many funerals and memorial services I’ve conducted, or even how many babies I’ve christened. I have some rough idea of course, and pretty good records from the times in my life when I’ve actually been serving just one church full-time. But for the first few years of my career (when I was still in Divinity School and for a few years afterwards); and then again during my second incarnation as a graduate student (when I was managing a bookstore while my former wife was earning her law degree, and later working on my own doctorate), my records are a lot more spotty.
So Tuesday afternoon (which is generally my day off anyway) after getting back home from the Harvard Divinity School Field Education supervisor site fair, I sat down on the floor of my upstairs study in the parsonage with my three-foot-high stack of old sermon manuscripts, and my old appointment calendars (which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve also kept), a legal pad and a laptop computer, and about ten hours later I actually had a fairly complete list of all the sermons I’ve preached over the past quarter-century, along with where and when I preached them. It’s still not a perfect list, of course (and probably never will be -- at least not in MY lifetime)...but it’s a lot better than what I had before. And it turns out that last Sunday I actually UNDERESTIMATED my homiletic productivity by approximately 129 sermons (or 29.4% -- not even close enough for government work), not including the double- (and on occasion even triple-) headers, when I’ve preached the same sermon multiple times at multiple services on the same Sunday morning.
Of course, even this number, as I mentioned last week, is still a little deceptive, since it also doesn’t really indicate what percentage of that number represent times I’ve preached the same sermon to different congregations on different Sunday mornings. When I was an intern at University Unitarian Church in Seattle, for example, I preached a sermon I called “The Palace Bridge in Prague” 13 different times to 13 different congregations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia in just nine months...and also in front of a cameraman in a small, local-access cable TV studio so that it could be videotaped and broadcast late at night for the spiritual edification of insomniacs.
And there are a few others (basically, my personal favorites) which, over the years, have received ALMOST as much exposure, although I still have a long way to go before I catch up with the over 5000 times Temple University founder Russell Conwell preached his famous “Acres of Diamonds” sermon. But it was a fascinating experience for me to sit there cross-legged in the midst of all that paper, the physical artifacts of half a lifetime of hard work, and to reflect back upon what it really means.
During that same 25-year period I have also officiated at over 200 weddings, beginning with my brother Kurt and sister-in-law Lynn’s on Queen Ann Hill in Seattle on July 11th, 1981 (exactly a month after my ordination) and most recently Margie Oleksiak and her husband Doug’s right here in this room on August 6th. I still haven’t added up all the christenings or the funerals. The babies, I’m a little ashamed to say, all start to run together in my mind after awhile (since I haven’t really stayed in one place long enough to see any of them grow up); while each funeral and memorial service is unique and special, and generally evokes unexpectedly powerful (and often painful) memories in me, which means that it’s going to take me a lot longer than I’d counted on to sit down and count them all. Still, the entire experience (and this is my point) was a vivid personal reminder of just how much a Church truly is a “cradle to grave” institution, with something different to offer us in every era in our lives.
Today also just so happens to be my father’s 72nd birthday. I feel very fortunate that both my parents are still living (although not with one another), and I’m also grateful that they both seem to be enjoying relatively good health as well. My Dad in particular has been a real inspiration for me with respect to how one can age gracefully while remaining young at heart, and with luck bounce back from adversity and personal disappointment no matter what your age, through hard work, an optimistic attitude, and the willingness to learn from one’s mistakes and move forward rather than dwelling in the past. These lessons have seemed especially important to me as I’ve looked around at all the significant milestones in my own life right now: the 25th anniversary of my ordination as I just mentioned, my own 50th birthday coming up next month, and of course the 250th anniversary of the founding of this congregation, just around the corner on July 1st, 2008.
Contrary to what you may have heard, it’s never really too late for an old dog to learn a few new tricks. This summer I took advantage of an opportunity to spend a couple of days at the Center for Career Development and Ministry in Dedham, getting my 25-year/God-only-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands-of-miles professional tune-up; and then a few weeks later I invested another lovely Summer day at the Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham at a retreat led by my Divinity School classmate Larry Peers on the theme of Ministry in Midlife.
Larry was the one who taught me the Celtic prayer I used to open the service, and from which I took the title of this sermon. “The Breathtaking Empty Space of an Open Door.” It’s an image full of potential and opportunity, yet also one of hesitation and doubt. We stand at the threshold of we know not what, looking out at unexplored territory, and uncertain whether to embrace the risk of change and step through the open doorway, or to remain indoors where at least it feels safe and familiar, effectively closing the door on anything new or different, including the possibility of growth and discovery.
Of course, open or shut are not the only potentialities present in an open door. Most doors actually swing both ways, and sometimes we find ourselves standing outside a door, wondering whether or not we should knock first before entering. We have grown accustomed in our society to thinking and speaking of “spiritual growth” as a journey or pilgrimage: a quest for personal self-discovery leading to greater wisdom and insight. But pilgrims generally depend upon the hospitality of strangers in order to sustain themselves on their journey, and often our most important moments of insight come as we are recuperating from wounds and injuries sustained along the road.
Saint Ignatius Loyola began composing his “Spiritual Exercises” while recovering from wounds he had received in battle, and later went on to found the Jesuit religious order. Likewise, wise people of all ages and cultures know that Wisdom itself is generally the product of failure, which forces us to learn the things we need to know in order to transcend it. And without someone to provide them with basic food and shelter, something to eat and a place to sleep, most pilgrims would never make it much farther than a few miles from their own front doors. The ministry of hospitality is an essential compliment to the quest for enlightenment and self-discovery: that “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” which stands at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes.
This is one of the reasons I’m so proud of the work this congregation does with Habitat for Humanity. Not only are we helping to provide shelter for people who desperately need homes of their own, but by participating in Habitat we become part of an international partnership of people of faith and good will, which breaks down walls and opens doors, and creates profoundly intimate connections between people of dramatically different backgrounds and circumstances, yet who share a common humanity. We need not always see eye to eye in order to walk together, or to share a meal and a roof over our heads while seeking shelter from the rigors of the road.
In the second volume of his “Tales of the Hassidic Masters,” Martin Buber recounts the story of “Rabbi Bunam,” who
...used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Yekel in Cracow. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king's palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eisik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening.
Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew—Eisik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Eisik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Eisik, and the other Yekel!" And he laughed again.
Rabbi Eisik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called "Reb Eisik's Shul...."
At the end of every pilgrimage is a homecoming. It may not be the same home we left behind, or it may simply seem like a different place because we have changed so much in our absence. But the experience of arriving where we started, and knowing the place for the first time, is the real treasure we gain at the end of all our exploring. Even so, it was poet Robert Frost, and not T. S. Eliot, who observed that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” And when we decide, as people of faith, to offer hospitality to pilgrims along their journey, we essentially invite them to make our home their own.
Building a House of Prayer with the treasure we discover under our very own noses not only requires that we learn to listen to and trust our own dreams, it also means learning to listen to and trust the dreams of others -- the dreams of people who we haven’t even met, who are still essentially strangers to us. It means learning to listen with our hearts, and letting go our our doubts, our restlessness, our discontent and despair, as we reorganize our lives in the direction of simplicity.
A couple of years ago now, this church struggled far more than it probably needed to over the decision to declare ourselves officially a “Welcoming Congregation.” And something I think was often overlooked in that distressing and sometimes painful struggle was that, by voting to call ourselves “Welcoming,” we didn’t actually decide to change anything about FRS itself. As far as I can tell, it has ALWAYS been the policy at FRS that “All Are Welcome Here.” So the actual conflict was apparently over something else, and the sooner we can figure out what that thing really was, the sooner we can resolve it, and come back together again around our more basic mission of providing hospitality and a spiritual home to ALL the explorers and pilgrims who pass through this community.
Understanding and articulating HOW we hope to be in relationship with one another -- the obligations and responsibilities we owe to one another, and the expectations we have of one another as well, is essential to our well-being as a community of faith. As best I can figure out, much of our struggle over welcoming seemed to be between people who felt that it was a shame that FRS should HAVE to declare itself officially a Welcoming Congregation, and others who felt it was a shame that we hadn’t done so already. And when all was said and done, the one thing we all seemed to have in common is that we were all feeling a little ashamed, so much so that some of us still feel a little uncomfortable about showing our faces here in church on a Sunday morning.
And that’s a real shame. A crying shame...
Shame is an emotion we feel when we know that our actions and our behaviors haven’t really lived up to our ideals. And even though it feels terrible, occasionally feeling a little shame is nothing to be ashamed of. Shame can actually be a good emotion -- because it helps us find our way back to the path we HOPE to follow, rather than getting stuck on the one we’ve wandered off on.
Of course, it’s been my experience that Unitarian Universalists don’t really talk all that much about shame, mostly I think because we tend to believe that all paths are pretty much equally good, provided that they start out in the right direction and end up at a good place. And we don’t really care that much for the straight and narrow path either; we tend to prefer the meandering paths, with lots of twists and turns and different viewpoints as we slowly make our way at our own comfortable pace toward the top of the mountain.
But when we notice that our neighbors and fellow creatures are no longer on the path with us, and possibly even lost in the woods, we really do have a responsibility to seek them out again, and tell them that we’ve missed them It may well be that they have simply chosen to follow a different path for awhile, which may or may not eventually bring them back home again here to FRS. But at the very least, we need to keep the door open, and put the kettle on to boil, and extend to them the same kind of radical hospitality we would offer to a stranger who showed up on our doorstep seeking shelter and something to eat. It’s what we’ve been doing up here on this hill for nearly 250 years now. And what I hope we will continue to do for another 250....
OPENING WORDS:
Lord, help me now to unclutter my life,
to organize myself in the direction of simplicity.
Lord, teach me to listen to my heart;
teach me to welcome change, instead of fearing it.
Lord, I give You these stirrings inside me,
I give You my discontent,
I give You my restlessness,
I give You my doubt,
I give You my despair,
I give You all the longings I hold inside.
Help me listen to these signs of change, of growth:
to listen seriously and follow where they lead
through the breathtaking empty space of an open door.
-a Celtic prayer from the Northumbria Community
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 17, 2006
I thought I’d begin my message this morning by sharing with you all an embarrassing story about myself, just so you’ll all know just how monk-like I can let myself get sometimes. And by “monk-like” I mean Adrian Monk, not Thomas Merton or Saint Francis of Assisi. But last Sunday I made a comment about how the title of my sermon should really have been “A Few Plain, Simple Truths about the Most Important Thing in the Universe (part 438).” The purpose of that apparently “off-hand” remark was to indicate that Yes, I have been doing this for quite a long time now, and Yes, I do tend to repeat myself frequently; and also to foreshadow the fact that a little later on in my sermon I was planning to quote at some length from the message I’d presented five years earlier to my congregation on Nantucket on the Sunday following September 11th. Because I want you to know that even though I very work hard to make it sound like I’m just standing up here sharing a bunch of random thoughts with a room full of my closest friends, these sermons are actually subtle and carefully-crafted works of literary composition. (Just don’t ruin the illusion by letting anybody else in on the secret, OK?)
But that number -- 438 -- was basically just something I’d pulled out of the air, after doing a few quick calculations on my fingers. And afterwards, it started to bother me a little (as somebody with a PhD in history from a University which, by the skin of their teeth, still has a top-25 ranked football team) that I actually didn’t know how many sermons I’ve preached in my lifetime....or how many weddings I’ve performed, how many funerals and memorial services I’ve conducted, or even how many babies I’ve christened. I have some rough idea of course, and pretty good records from the times in my life when I’ve actually been serving just one church full-time. But for the first few years of my career (when I was still in Divinity School and for a few years afterwards); and then again during my second incarnation as a graduate student (when I was managing a bookstore while my former wife was earning her law degree, and later working on my own doctorate), my records are a lot more spotty.
So Tuesday afternoon (which is generally my day off anyway) after getting back home from the Harvard Divinity School Field Education supervisor site fair, I sat down on the floor of my upstairs study in the parsonage with my three-foot-high stack of old sermon manuscripts, and my old appointment calendars (which I’m embarrassed to say I’ve also kept), a legal pad and a laptop computer, and about ten hours later I actually had a fairly complete list of all the sermons I’ve preached over the past quarter-century, along with where and when I preached them. It’s still not a perfect list, of course (and probably never will be -- at least not in MY lifetime)...but it’s a lot better than what I had before. And it turns out that last Sunday I actually UNDERESTIMATED my homiletic productivity by approximately 129 sermons (or 29.4% -- not even close enough for government work), not including the double- (and on occasion even triple-) headers, when I’ve preached the same sermon multiple times at multiple services on the same Sunday morning.
Of course, even this number, as I mentioned last week, is still a little deceptive, since it also doesn’t really indicate what percentage of that number represent times I’ve preached the same sermon to different congregations on different Sunday mornings. When I was an intern at University Unitarian Church in Seattle, for example, I preached a sermon I called “The Palace Bridge in Prague” 13 different times to 13 different congregations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia in just nine months...and also in front of a cameraman in a small, local-access cable TV studio so that it could be videotaped and broadcast late at night for the spiritual edification of insomniacs.
And there are a few others (basically, my personal favorites) which, over the years, have received ALMOST as much exposure, although I still have a long way to go before I catch up with the over 5000 times Temple University founder Russell Conwell preached his famous “Acres of Diamonds” sermon. But it was a fascinating experience for me to sit there cross-legged in the midst of all that paper, the physical artifacts of half a lifetime of hard work, and to reflect back upon what it really means.
During that same 25-year period I have also officiated at over 200 weddings, beginning with my brother Kurt and sister-in-law Lynn’s on Queen Ann Hill in Seattle on July 11th, 1981 (exactly a month after my ordination) and most recently Margie Oleksiak and her husband Doug’s right here in this room on August 6th. I still haven’t added up all the christenings or the funerals. The babies, I’m a little ashamed to say, all start to run together in my mind after awhile (since I haven’t really stayed in one place long enough to see any of them grow up); while each funeral and memorial service is unique and special, and generally evokes unexpectedly powerful (and often painful) memories in me, which means that it’s going to take me a lot longer than I’d counted on to sit down and count them all. Still, the entire experience (and this is my point) was a vivid personal reminder of just how much a Church truly is a “cradle to grave” institution, with something different to offer us in every era in our lives.
Today also just so happens to be my father’s 72nd birthday. I feel very fortunate that both my parents are still living (although not with one another), and I’m also grateful that they both seem to be enjoying relatively good health as well. My Dad in particular has been a real inspiration for me with respect to how one can age gracefully while remaining young at heart, and with luck bounce back from adversity and personal disappointment no matter what your age, through hard work, an optimistic attitude, and the willingness to learn from one’s mistakes and move forward rather than dwelling in the past. These lessons have seemed especially important to me as I’ve looked around at all the significant milestones in my own life right now: the 25th anniversary of my ordination as I just mentioned, my own 50th birthday coming up next month, and of course the 250th anniversary of the founding of this congregation, just around the corner on July 1st, 2008.
Contrary to what you may have heard, it’s never really too late for an old dog to learn a few new tricks. This summer I took advantage of an opportunity to spend a couple of days at the Center for Career Development and Ministry in Dedham, getting my 25-year/God-only-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-thousands-of-miles professional tune-up; and then a few weeks later I invested another lovely Summer day at the Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham at a retreat led by my Divinity School classmate Larry Peers on the theme of Ministry in Midlife.
Larry was the one who taught me the Celtic prayer I used to open the service, and from which I took the title of this sermon. “The Breathtaking Empty Space of an Open Door.” It’s an image full of potential and opportunity, yet also one of hesitation and doubt. We stand at the threshold of we know not what, looking out at unexplored territory, and uncertain whether to embrace the risk of change and step through the open doorway, or to remain indoors where at least it feels safe and familiar, effectively closing the door on anything new or different, including the possibility of growth and discovery.
Of course, open or shut are not the only potentialities present in an open door. Most doors actually swing both ways, and sometimes we find ourselves standing outside a door, wondering whether or not we should knock first before entering. We have grown accustomed in our society to thinking and speaking of “spiritual growth” as a journey or pilgrimage: a quest for personal self-discovery leading to greater wisdom and insight. But pilgrims generally depend upon the hospitality of strangers in order to sustain themselves on their journey, and often our most important moments of insight come as we are recuperating from wounds and injuries sustained along the road.
Saint Ignatius Loyola began composing his “Spiritual Exercises” while recovering from wounds he had received in battle, and later went on to found the Jesuit religious order. Likewise, wise people of all ages and cultures know that Wisdom itself is generally the product of failure, which forces us to learn the things we need to know in order to transcend it. And without someone to provide them with basic food and shelter, something to eat and a place to sleep, most pilgrims would never make it much farther than a few miles from their own front doors. The ministry of hospitality is an essential compliment to the quest for enlightenment and self-discovery: that “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” which stands at the heart of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes.
This is one of the reasons I’m so proud of the work this congregation does with Habitat for Humanity. Not only are we helping to provide shelter for people who desperately need homes of their own, but by participating in Habitat we become part of an international partnership of people of faith and good will, which breaks down walls and opens doors, and creates profoundly intimate connections between people of dramatically different backgrounds and circumstances, yet who share a common humanity. We need not always see eye to eye in order to walk together, or to share a meal and a roof over our heads while seeking shelter from the rigors of the road.
In the second volume of his “Tales of the Hassidic Masters,” Martin Buber recounts the story of “Rabbi Bunam,” who
...used to tell young men who came to him for the first time the story of Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Yekel in Cracow. After many years of great poverty which had never shaken his faith in God, he dreamed someone bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge which leads to the king's palace. When the dream recurred a third time, Rabbi Eisik prepared for the journey and set out for Prague. But the bridge was guarded day and night and he did not dare to start digging. Nevertheless he went to the bridge every morning and kept walking around it until evening.
Finally the captain of the guards, who had been watching him, asked in a kindly way whether he was looking for something or waiting for somebody. Rabbi Eisik told him of the dream which had brought him here from a faraway country. The captain laughed: "And so to please the dream, you poor fellow wore out your shoes to come here! As for having faith in dreams, if I had had it, I should have had to get going when a dream once told me to go to Cracow and dig for treasure under the stove in the room of a Jew—Eisik, son of Yekel, that was the name! Eisik, son of Yekel! I can just imagine what it would be like, how I should have to try every house over there, where one half of the Jews are named Eisik, and the other Yekel!" And he laughed again.
Rabbi Eisik bowed, traveled home, dug up the treasure from under the stove, and built the House of Prayer which is called "Reb Eisik's Shul...."
At the end of every pilgrimage is a homecoming. It may not be the same home we left behind, or it may simply seem like a different place because we have changed so much in our absence. But the experience of arriving where we started, and knowing the place for the first time, is the real treasure we gain at the end of all our exploring. Even so, it was poet Robert Frost, and not T. S. Eliot, who observed that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” And when we decide, as people of faith, to offer hospitality to pilgrims along their journey, we essentially invite them to make our home their own.
Building a House of Prayer with the treasure we discover under our very own noses not only requires that we learn to listen to and trust our own dreams, it also means learning to listen to and trust the dreams of others -- the dreams of people who we haven’t even met, who are still essentially strangers to us. It means learning to listen with our hearts, and letting go our our doubts, our restlessness, our discontent and despair, as we reorganize our lives in the direction of simplicity.
A couple of years ago now, this church struggled far more than it probably needed to over the decision to declare ourselves officially a “Welcoming Congregation.” And something I think was often overlooked in that distressing and sometimes painful struggle was that, by voting to call ourselves “Welcoming,” we didn’t actually decide to change anything about FRS itself. As far as I can tell, it has ALWAYS been the policy at FRS that “All Are Welcome Here.” So the actual conflict was apparently over something else, and the sooner we can figure out what that thing really was, the sooner we can resolve it, and come back together again around our more basic mission of providing hospitality and a spiritual home to ALL the explorers and pilgrims who pass through this community.
Understanding and articulating HOW we hope to be in relationship with one another -- the obligations and responsibilities we owe to one another, and the expectations we have of one another as well, is essential to our well-being as a community of faith. As best I can figure out, much of our struggle over welcoming seemed to be between people who felt that it was a shame that FRS should HAVE to declare itself officially a Welcoming Congregation, and others who felt it was a shame that we hadn’t done so already. And when all was said and done, the one thing we all seemed to have in common is that we were all feeling a little ashamed, so much so that some of us still feel a little uncomfortable about showing our faces here in church on a Sunday morning.
And that’s a real shame. A crying shame...
Shame is an emotion we feel when we know that our actions and our behaviors haven’t really lived up to our ideals. And even though it feels terrible, occasionally feeling a little shame is nothing to be ashamed of. Shame can actually be a good emotion -- because it helps us find our way back to the path we HOPE to follow, rather than getting stuck on the one we’ve wandered off on.
Of course, it’s been my experience that Unitarian Universalists don’t really talk all that much about shame, mostly I think because we tend to believe that all paths are pretty much equally good, provided that they start out in the right direction and end up at a good place. And we don’t really care that much for the straight and narrow path either; we tend to prefer the meandering paths, with lots of twists and turns and different viewpoints as we slowly make our way at our own comfortable pace toward the top of the mountain.
But when we notice that our neighbors and fellow creatures are no longer on the path with us, and possibly even lost in the woods, we really do have a responsibility to seek them out again, and tell them that we’ve missed them It may well be that they have simply chosen to follow a different path for awhile, which may or may not eventually bring them back home again here to FRS. But at the very least, we need to keep the door open, and put the kettle on to boil, and extend to them the same kind of radical hospitality we would offer to a stranger who showed up on our doorstep seeking shelter and something to eat. It’s what we’ve been doing up here on this hill for nearly 250 years now. And what I hope we will continue to do for another 250....
OPENING WORDS:
Lord, help me now to unclutter my life,
to organize myself in the direction of simplicity.
Lord, teach me to listen to my heart;
teach me to welcome change, instead of fearing it.
Lord, I give You these stirrings inside me,
I give You my discontent,
I give You my restlessness,
I give You my doubt,
I give You my despair,
I give You all the longings I hold inside.
Help me listen to these signs of change, of growth:
to listen seriously and follow where they lead
through the breathtaking empty space of an open door.
-a Celtic prayer from the Northumbria Community
Sunday, September 10, 2006
THE PLAIN, SIMPLE TRUTH ABOUT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE UNIVERSE
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 10th, 2006
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? --Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
I’m just a little curious, but how many of you read the title of today’s sermon, and came here this morning expecting to hear a message about money? Don’t worry -- you’re safe. But it does bring to mind another question, which is: How many of us, either intentionally or by default, live our lives AS IF Money truly were the most important thing in the Universe?
It’s easy to succumb to this temptation, I know, especially here in America, in this day and age. Money seems so tangible. We can see it and touch it (even taste it and smell it if we wish). It’s easy to count, and to add up.... It’s specific, measurable, and reasonably attainable, and perhaps most importantly, in most everyday situations money can be readily converted into things that really do seem to matter: like freedom, security, status, power.... While a lack of money often feels like a very important thing indeed.
And yet, if I were to stand up here in this pulpit, as a spiritual leader, and seriously suggest that Money really IS the most important thing in the Universe, I suspect it wouldn’t be too long before even Unitarian Universalists would be quoting back to me passages of Scripture to the contrary. Things like how “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” And yet the Idea, the Metaphor of Money often persists at the heart of our more abstract speculations about what we really DO “Value,” what is TRULY “Worthwhile,” what “Enriches" our lives in ways that mere Money never can. So much of our experience in this world simply feels like a transaction: what must we obtain in order to feel satisfied, and what price are we going to have to pay in order to acquire it? And so we barter away our birthright, in exchange for a little bread and a bowl of lentils.
Just after I publicized the title of today’s sermon it occurred to me that I’d actually made a mistake. The title should have been “A few Plain, Simple Truths about the Most Important Thing in the Universe (part 438).” Or something like that. Actually, it’s a little difficult for me to say exactly what that number should be, since I haven’t really kept track of all the sermons I’ve preached over the past twenty-five years...and a lot of the time I’ve just been repeating myself anyway. But that number is somewhere in the ballpark... and I do know that the five boxes of sermon manuscripts (that I’ve kept), when stacked on top of one another, come up to about my waist. And I imagine I’ll get them up over my head before I’m through. I even thought about hauling them all over here today just so you could see for yourselves, but then I thought “What’s the Point?” Especially now that all this same information can easily be stored on a USB flash drive about the size of my little finger, and summed up in a couple of paragraphs.
Let me tell you the plain, simple truth about the most important thing in the Universe.
None of us asked to be born. And yet, through chance, or destiny, or a simple accident of fate, each of us was given this amazing gift of life. Each of us is unique. There has never been anyone exactly like us before, and there will never be anyone exactly like us ever again. And every one of us is going to die someday -- some of us sooner than others, but all of us eventually in our own time. And we are powerless to change that fact, wish as we will that it were not so.
That’s the plain, simple truth.
And what we CHOOSE to do with this gift: this random and undeserved chance to live and love and BE ALIVE...is the most Important Thing in the Universe...for us. It is literally a once in a lifetime opportunity. Yet it doesn’t take place in isolation, without a context. Our lives are experiments in Meaning-Making. And what we learn, through trial and error, is added to the collective store of human wisdom.
I hope this isn’t all starting to seem just a little too morbid for a Sunday Morning, especially the first Sunday back after a long vacation from preaching. But I’ve been thinking about these topics a lot over the summer, and not just because tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; or the recent and untimely deaths of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter,” and our own Scott Munroe (whose memorial service, as you’ve already heard, will be later this afternoon). And I also hope you appreciate that there’s nothing especially new or newsworthy about what I’ve been saying here today. I’m sure you’ve heard it all many times before, and will no doubt hear it many times again.
The Plain, Simple Truth about our accidental Birth and our inevitable Death is the easy part. It’s the in-between, the living and dying and being alive part, which gets complicated, which takes a lifetime to explore and discover and understand. And it’s not really all that important whether or not we get it through our heads, this undeniable truth that all life is mortal. The real issue is whether or not we will take it to heart; whether we will live our lives in fear of the shadow of death, or embrace the fact of our own mortality, and live our lives meaningfully and courageously in spite of it.
I would like to say just a few words about September 11th. Five years ago, our nation was brutally attacked by a small band of ruthless and evil fanatics who cared as little for their own lives as they did for the lives of their victims. And here is a little of what I had to say at the time to my congregation on Nantucket, on the Sunday following that “Mind-Numbing Act of Senseless Violence.” After first drawing a distinction between between a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe,” I went on to point out that:
...a catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which then becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of last Tuesday [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends....
Obviously, a lot has happened in the past five years. I don’t have to spell it out -- we’ve all lived through it, and you can follow the news as well as I can. The Patriot Act. Two foreign wars. Thousands of casualties; billions in debt. Secret (and not so secret) prisons. Torture by any other name. Our leaders have changed their stories several times, but I still stand by the wisdom of everything I said that day, and it breaks my heart to see the course our nation has chosen to pursue instead. I only hope that we will come to our senses before it’s too late, and find some way to redeem our nation’s honor from the shameful depths to which it has been dragged....
A moment ago I observed that even though each of us is unique, we do not live our lives in isolation, and that whatever meaning we find in life is added to the collective store of human wisdom. This wisdom is ours to draw upon whenever we wish, if only we are willing to take the time to study and learn it. The path to greater wisdom begins by embracing the attitude of a learner, or (more accurately) three interconnected attitudes which together create an open, curious heart.
The first of these attitudes (which all preachers love, because it alliterates) is the Attitude of Gratitude. Gratitude is more the merely feeling thankful for the lucky accident of having been born. Gratitude is the realization that our own good fortune is not always (or even often) entirely of our own doing -- that we begin our lives indebted to people we may never meet in ways that we can only begin to imagine, and will never be able to repay. Psychologist Melodie Beattie has written: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” It is only when we can truly appreciate how fortunate we are simply to have the opportunity to be disappointed, that we can raise our eyes beyond the limitations of our own lives to see the larger world beyond ourselves.
The compliment to Gratitude is an Attitude of Generosity. Again, Generosity is more than merely a feeling of Noblesse Oblige: the realization that to those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. True Generosity is much more complicated than that. It is only by expressing our Generosity that we gain access to our Creativity as well -- that part of our personality which Scripture tells us is created in the image of God. And this is true not only in terms of artistic creativity, or our capacity to exercise our imaginations through the use of ingenuity and invention. It also extends to the most basic act of biological procreation, which results in the generous creation of a new Generation. The nurturing generosity of parenthood, and all which that entails, is for many people both life’s greatest challenge and life’s greatest reward. And yet, we need not be biological parents in order to give birth to something new and exciting and valuable and important, out of the substance of our own lives.
So far this morning I’ve been talking an awful lot about what a great gift life is, and how fortunate we all are to have this wonderful and priceless opportunity to experience it. But what about those times when life doesn’t seem all that great? Real Life is full of disappointment, of reverses and setbacks, frustration, discouragement, even outright defeat...not to mention no small measure of apparently arbitrary affliction and meaningless suffering. Evil is real. Life isn’t fair. And these feelings can’t simply be dismissed as just a lot of self-absorbed ingratitude.
When life does treat us unfairly, we have many different options to consider, but basically they boil down to two. We can try to get even, or we can try to get over it. Our first instinct is often to attempt the former, to allow our feelings of anger and outrage and righteous indignation to take control of our lives, and inspire us to return evil for evil. But wisdom teaches us that more often than not, living well truly is the best revenge. An Attitude of Forgiveness is sometimes mistaken for weakness, or an inappropriate retreat from the principles of Justice and Accountability. But forgiving someone does not mean that they cease to be responsible for their actions. It merely relieves us of the responsibility of punishing them for their transgressions personally.
What truly lies at the heart of Forgiveness is a profound sense of personal humility, and a well-developed capacity for empathy. “To understand all is to forgive all,” wrote the French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view, while at the same time recognizing and acknowledging one’s own imperfections and shortcomings, is not only the secret of a forgiving attitude, it is also essential for developing honest and authentic relationships with other human beings. Or to put it another way, we learn to forgive others by learning to accept and forgive ourselves, which in turn leads us to deeper levels of understanding, and the possibility of real friendship. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is one definition of Justice. Learning to “do unto others as we would have others do unto us” takes us to an entirely different place altogether.
In her poem, “When Death Comes, “ Mary Oliver writes:
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
When we can learn to wake up each morning, and ask ourselves “What small thing can I do today, to make the world a little better?”
When we remember, each night before we go to bed, to remind ourselves how lucky we are to be alive, and to express our gratitude for that gift.
And if in-between, when things don’t exactly go the way we’d hoped, we can find somewhere deep within us the ability to put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes, to accept the fact that life isn’t fair, and to keep in mind that we aren’t exactly perfect either....
Then we will have taken those first, important steps towards making our lives something particular, and something real. We will have chosen the path that leads to a wisdom larger than ourselves, rather than succumbing to a self-serving search for personal satisfaction.
And in the end, we will be happier for having done so.
And that is the Plain, Simple Truth about the Most Important Thing in the Universe.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday September 10th, 2006
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? --Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
I’m just a little curious, but how many of you read the title of today’s sermon, and came here this morning expecting to hear a message about money? Don’t worry -- you’re safe. But it does bring to mind another question, which is: How many of us, either intentionally or by default, live our lives AS IF Money truly were the most important thing in the Universe?
It’s easy to succumb to this temptation, I know, especially here in America, in this day and age. Money seems so tangible. We can see it and touch it (even taste it and smell it if we wish). It’s easy to count, and to add up.... It’s specific, measurable, and reasonably attainable, and perhaps most importantly, in most everyday situations money can be readily converted into things that really do seem to matter: like freedom, security, status, power.... While a lack of money often feels like a very important thing indeed.
And yet, if I were to stand up here in this pulpit, as a spiritual leader, and seriously suggest that Money really IS the most important thing in the Universe, I suspect it wouldn’t be too long before even Unitarian Universalists would be quoting back to me passages of Scripture to the contrary. Things like how “the love of money is the root of all evil,” and “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” And yet the Idea, the Metaphor of Money often persists at the heart of our more abstract speculations about what we really DO “Value,” what is TRULY “Worthwhile,” what “Enriches" our lives in ways that mere Money never can. So much of our experience in this world simply feels like a transaction: what must we obtain in order to feel satisfied, and what price are we going to have to pay in order to acquire it? And so we barter away our birthright, in exchange for a little bread and a bowl of lentils.
Just after I publicized the title of today’s sermon it occurred to me that I’d actually made a mistake. The title should have been “A few Plain, Simple Truths about the Most Important Thing in the Universe (part 438).” Or something like that. Actually, it’s a little difficult for me to say exactly what that number should be, since I haven’t really kept track of all the sermons I’ve preached over the past twenty-five years...and a lot of the time I’ve just been repeating myself anyway. But that number is somewhere in the ballpark... and I do know that the five boxes of sermon manuscripts (that I’ve kept), when stacked on top of one another, come up to about my waist. And I imagine I’ll get them up over my head before I’m through. I even thought about hauling them all over here today just so you could see for yourselves, but then I thought “What’s the Point?” Especially now that all this same information can easily be stored on a USB flash drive about the size of my little finger, and summed up in a couple of paragraphs.
Let me tell you the plain, simple truth about the most important thing in the Universe.
None of us asked to be born. And yet, through chance, or destiny, or a simple accident of fate, each of us was given this amazing gift of life. Each of us is unique. There has never been anyone exactly like us before, and there will never be anyone exactly like us ever again. And every one of us is going to die someday -- some of us sooner than others, but all of us eventually in our own time. And we are powerless to change that fact, wish as we will that it were not so.
That’s the plain, simple truth.
And what we CHOOSE to do with this gift: this random and undeserved chance to live and love and BE ALIVE...is the most Important Thing in the Universe...for us. It is literally a once in a lifetime opportunity. Yet it doesn’t take place in isolation, without a context. Our lives are experiments in Meaning-Making. And what we learn, through trial and error, is added to the collective store of human wisdom.
I hope this isn’t all starting to seem just a little too morbid for a Sunday Morning, especially the first Sunday back after a long vacation from preaching. But I’ve been thinking about these topics a lot over the summer, and not just because tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; or the recent and untimely deaths of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter,” and our own Scott Munroe (whose memorial service, as you’ve already heard, will be later this afternoon). And I also hope you appreciate that there’s nothing especially new or newsworthy about what I’ve been saying here today. I’m sure you’ve heard it all many times before, and will no doubt hear it many times again.
The Plain, Simple Truth about our accidental Birth and our inevitable Death is the easy part. It’s the in-between, the living and dying and being alive part, which gets complicated, which takes a lifetime to explore and discover and understand. And it’s not really all that important whether or not we get it through our heads, this undeniable truth that all life is mortal. The real issue is whether or not we will take it to heart; whether we will live our lives in fear of the shadow of death, or embrace the fact of our own mortality, and live our lives meaningfully and courageously in spite of it.
I would like to say just a few words about September 11th. Five years ago, our nation was brutally attacked by a small band of ruthless and evil fanatics who cared as little for their own lives as they did for the lives of their victims. And here is a little of what I had to say at the time to my congregation on Nantucket, on the Sunday following that “Mind-Numbing Act of Senseless Violence.” After first drawing a distinction between between a “tragedy” and a “catastrophe,” I went on to point out that:
...a catastrophe is a calamity, a disaster, an event which inflicts widespread destruction and suffering. But tragedy contains an additional element: the fact that the cause of that calamity originates in the arrogant pride or hubris of an otherwise heroic figure, which blinds him or her to a fatal flaw within their character, which then becomes the source of their undoing. The same quality which makes the hero great also makes them vulnerable, and their destruction becomes tragic because it might have so easily been avoided, had the hero simply exercised a little more humility.
Think for a moment about the tragedies of Oedipus, or Othello. A calamity becomes tragic because a hero’s greatness, their capacity for bold, courageous, decisive action, unleashes a chain of events beyond their control, which eventually overtakes them and robs them of their own freedom to decide their destiny. Their fate becomes sealed, because their pride has in some way outraged and offended the Gods, who are ultimately responsible for preserving justice, and order, and equity in the Universe.
The events of last Tuesday [September 11th] were without question calamitous. But they will become tragic only if we allow ourselves, in our arrogant pride, to set out blindly upon a course of action that will eventually transform us into something we can not abide. Don’t misunderstand me on this point. It is essential that we commit the resources of this nation to bringing the perpetrators of this crime to justice. But, in doing so, it is equally essential that we do not allow ourselves to become criminals in our own right. I really can’t say it any more plainly than that. There is too much blood on our hands already; we are not always the heroic defenders of freedom and justice that we like to see ourselves as being. So long as we persist in remaining blind to our own faults, we risk unleashing a tragic calamity of truly catastrophic proportion.
Simply because we have been wronged does not make us right. Simply because we are powerful enough to hurt those whom we perceive to be our enemies does not in any sense justify our doing so. If our actions are to be regarded as just and proper, we must seek out the cooperation of the international community, behave consistently with standards of due process, and truly become the champions of freedom, justice, and human rights that we so often claim to be.
And above all...we must believe and trust the words of America’s first (and in my mind still the best) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, and remember that we most truly succeed in destroying our enemies when we are able to make them our friends....
Obviously, a lot has happened in the past five years. I don’t have to spell it out -- we’ve all lived through it, and you can follow the news as well as I can. The Patriot Act. Two foreign wars. Thousands of casualties; billions in debt. Secret (and not so secret) prisons. Torture by any other name. Our leaders have changed their stories several times, but I still stand by the wisdom of everything I said that day, and it breaks my heart to see the course our nation has chosen to pursue instead. I only hope that we will come to our senses before it’s too late, and find some way to redeem our nation’s honor from the shameful depths to which it has been dragged....
A moment ago I observed that even though each of us is unique, we do not live our lives in isolation, and that whatever meaning we find in life is added to the collective store of human wisdom. This wisdom is ours to draw upon whenever we wish, if only we are willing to take the time to study and learn it. The path to greater wisdom begins by embracing the attitude of a learner, or (more accurately) three interconnected attitudes which together create an open, curious heart.
The first of these attitudes (which all preachers love, because it alliterates) is the Attitude of Gratitude. Gratitude is more the merely feeling thankful for the lucky accident of having been born. Gratitude is the realization that our own good fortune is not always (or even often) entirely of our own doing -- that we begin our lives indebted to people we may never meet in ways that we can only begin to imagine, and will never be able to repay. Psychologist Melodie Beattie has written: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” It is only when we can truly appreciate how fortunate we are simply to have the opportunity to be disappointed, that we can raise our eyes beyond the limitations of our own lives to see the larger world beyond ourselves.
The compliment to Gratitude is an Attitude of Generosity. Again, Generosity is more than merely a feeling of Noblesse Oblige: the realization that to those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. True Generosity is much more complicated than that. It is only by expressing our Generosity that we gain access to our Creativity as well -- that part of our personality which Scripture tells us is created in the image of God. And this is true not only in terms of artistic creativity, or our capacity to exercise our imaginations through the use of ingenuity and invention. It also extends to the most basic act of biological procreation, which results in the generous creation of a new Generation. The nurturing generosity of parenthood, and all which that entails, is for many people both life’s greatest challenge and life’s greatest reward. And yet, we need not be biological parents in order to give birth to something new and exciting and valuable and important, out of the substance of our own lives.
So far this morning I’ve been talking an awful lot about what a great gift life is, and how fortunate we all are to have this wonderful and priceless opportunity to experience it. But what about those times when life doesn’t seem all that great? Real Life is full of disappointment, of reverses and setbacks, frustration, discouragement, even outright defeat...not to mention no small measure of apparently arbitrary affliction and meaningless suffering. Evil is real. Life isn’t fair. And these feelings can’t simply be dismissed as just a lot of self-absorbed ingratitude.
When life does treat us unfairly, we have many different options to consider, but basically they boil down to two. We can try to get even, or we can try to get over it. Our first instinct is often to attempt the former, to allow our feelings of anger and outrage and righteous indignation to take control of our lives, and inspire us to return evil for evil. But wisdom teaches us that more often than not, living well truly is the best revenge. An Attitude of Forgiveness is sometimes mistaken for weakness, or an inappropriate retreat from the principles of Justice and Accountability. But forgiving someone does not mean that they cease to be responsible for their actions. It merely relieves us of the responsibility of punishing them for their transgressions personally.
What truly lies at the heart of Forgiveness is a profound sense of personal humility, and a well-developed capacity for empathy. “To understand all is to forgive all,” wrote the French Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus. The ability to see things from another person’s point of view, while at the same time recognizing and acknowledging one’s own imperfections and shortcomings, is not only the secret of a forgiving attitude, it is also essential for developing honest and authentic relationships with other human beings. Or to put it another way, we learn to forgive others by learning to accept and forgive ourselves, which in turn leads us to deeper levels of understanding, and the possibility of real friendship. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is one definition of Justice. Learning to “do unto others as we would have others do unto us” takes us to an entirely different place altogether.
In her poem, “When Death Comes, “ Mary Oliver writes:
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
When we can learn to wake up each morning, and ask ourselves “What small thing can I do today, to make the world a little better?”
When we remember, each night before we go to bed, to remind ourselves how lucky we are to be alive, and to express our gratitude for that gift.
And if in-between, when things don’t exactly go the way we’d hoped, we can find somewhere deep within us the ability to put ourselves in the other guy’s shoes, to accept the fact that life isn’t fair, and to keep in mind that we aren’t exactly perfect either....
Then we will have taken those first, important steps towards making our lives something particular, and something real. We will have chosen the path that leads to a wisdom larger than ourselves, rather than succumbing to a self-serving search for personal satisfaction.
And in the end, we will be happier for having done so.
And that is the Plain, Simple Truth about the Most Important Thing in the Universe.
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