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.