...LABORS OF LOVE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday November 26th, 2006


I thought I’d start out this morning telling you all about the terrible dilemma I faced yesterday trying to decide whether I should take advantage of the gorgeous, crisp, clear Autumn weather and go outdoors to rake up the leaves in my yard, or instead remain indoors like I do almost every other Saturday and work on my sermon instead. Didn’t want to spend too much time ruminating about it either, since every minute I spent thinking about the alternatives was basically just one more minute when I wasn’t doing either; so I quickly decided to compromise, and to go outdoors and rake up SOME of the leaves while THINKING about my sermon, with the thought that I could always preach a little shorter sermon if I had too -- a compromise which I figured would please just about everyone EXCEPT those few tormented souls who actually PREFER long-winded sermons (and of course those few equally-tormented souls who are obsessed by the sight of a few unraked leaves lying around, and can’t rest until they’re gone), not to mention my dog Parker, who, had she been given a choice, no doubt would have much rather spent the time outdoors with me doing something more interesting than watching me lean on a rake.

Now I appreciate the fact that there are some people who find yard work spiritually inspiring, but generally I’m not one of them. For me, yard work has always pretty much been seen and understood as a form of involuntary servitude imposed upon me by my father, or my grandmother, or still later my former wife...something I would just as soon have avoided if possible, or at the very least done as little as I could possibly get away with. I do appreciate the sense of satisfaction that comes from the tangible completion of a job well done...and yard work certainly lends itself to that sense of accomplishment much better than a lot of the more intangible work many of us do to make a living. But for my own part (especially when I was still a kid), I generally found myself learning how to look busy while looking off into the distance thinking profound thoughts, all the while keeping an eye peeled for my father, or my grandmother, or (later) my former wife. And of course I did eventually figure out that I could actually USE the rake and still think profound thoughts, although for safety’s sake I tried to draw the line at tools with sharp edges or mechanical equipment.

And at the end of the day, I actually ended up raking a lot more of the leaves yesterday than I’d planned to, since as it turns out I’m ALSO one of those tormented souls who can’t really stand to see any unraked leaves lying around either, especially once I’ve started to rake them up. I’m getting better about it, of course, especially now that I’m back in therapy. But like a lot of folks, I still generally prefer to finish what I start, even when in the greater scheme of things I know it’s really not that important that I do. And this sometimes also leads to a reluctance to begin something I’m not sure I’m going to be able to finish, even though I understand perfectly well that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step....


Last Sunday (and really for a good deal of the past year) I spoke again about the essential relationship between Gratitude and Generosity: how our feelings of thankfulness for the many blessings we have received in life, including the gift of life itself, both inspire us and in many ways obligate us to share those blessings with others in creative, generative ways. These “debts of gratitude” are what bind us together in community, as members of an interdependent network of mutual accountability and support which forms the foundation of civil society itself.

And now today I want to explore this concept a little more deeply by looking at two other sets of interrelated values which, together, round out my own understanding of the life of Faith, and what it means to be a person of Faith, living within a Faith Community. But perhaps I ought to start out just by talking a little again about the idea of “Faith” itself. Faith is often understood (or perhaps I should say misunderstood) as “a Belief in Things We Know Aren’t True.” Yet a more accurate definition might be something like “trust” or “confidence” -- in other words, a belief in something we know we can’t prove, but also know in our heart of hearts is true anyway, and are therefore willing act confidently on that belief trusting that things will turn out the way we expect them to.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kirkegaard called this attitude the “leap of faith,” while Harvard psychologist William James wisely observed that often our own confidence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, allowing us to accomplish difficult tasks where others failed simply because of their own self-doubt. And this is a very different proposition from the kind of “wishful thinking” that often passes for faith, which tells us that that individuals can achieve anything they dream, if only they believe it hard enough.

Yet there are also many times in life when we are asked to take things “on faith” -- not because we can verify for ourselves the truth of what we are being told, but because we are confident of the trustworthiness of the person who is encouraging us to “keep the faith.” And this is what makes Faith such a delicate matter, because once Trust has been broken it is very difficult to have confidence in that person ever again. Learning how to keep faith with others, by defending our own trustworthiness so that others can always be confident of us and of what we say, is at the heart of becoming an authentic person of faith, as well as a responsible member of a faith community.

Trustworthiness, Gratitude, and Generosity all might be thought of as “inner” virtues, in that they originate out of our own experience of living, and then are expressed in our interactions with other people. But there is a second, similar set of virtues which are much more relational in nature, and these are Compassion, Understanding, and Forgiveness. Compassion is literally the capacity to “suffer with” -- an ability to feel the pain of someone else as if it were your own. Compassion is a feeling of sympathy, which combines with our feelings of Generosity and Gratitude in order to create the intuitive basis of humanity’s most basic ethical principle, the so-called “Golden Rule” to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”

Understanding takes this principle a step further, from feeling to thinking. Understanding is more than just the ability to put yourself in the other guy’s shoes, it’s also an ability to see the world through their eyes as well -- to step outside the limitations of our own personal experiences and familiar worldview, and to imagine intellectually how the world looks from a perspective different than our own. This ability to Understand is obviously increased by good communication -- by the open and honest exchange of information and experiences -- and also simply by the willingness to consider and explore different points of view. The more open we are to listening and learning from one another, the broader our capacity for Understanding becomes.

And then there is Forgiveness. You’ve heard me before quote Albert Camus that “To understand all is to forgive all,” but sometimes that process works just as well in the opposite direction. Sometimes we simply need to learn to forgive one another on general principles -- to look beyond the shortcomings of those who may have hurt or offended us, and to let go of our natural desire to balance accounts and settle old scores, in order to make mutual understanding possible, and avoid additional ill will in the future. Understanding naturally generates Forgiveness, but Forgiveness can just as easily generate Understanding, if only we are willing to take that first great leap.

At the heart of all three of these “relational virtues” of Compassion, Understanding, and Forgiveness is the capacity for Empathy, which is perhaps most easily described as simply a basic, fundamental “gut” awareness that other people have feelings too, and there is a lot more to the “real world” than merely our own appetites, ambitions, and desires. To my mind, Empathy is probably the single most important thing we need to teach our children, and also the single most important quality we need to cultivate continuously within ourselves.

Individuals who lack the capacity for empathy are technically known as sociopaths; and yet often times it seems as though our society itself rewards those individuals who are most ruthlessly and single-mindedly focused on their own personal ambition and self-interest to the exclusion of everything else, and that the pressure of competing with those who care for nothing or no one other than themselves forces us into the position of “looking out for Number One” as well. The Scripture cautions us “what does it profit a human being to gain the whole world and lose their own soul?” And yet a society which so ruthlessly separates its members into “winners” and “losers,” in the struggle simply to keep body and soul together, can easily distract us from this lesson, and focus our attention in a different direction.

But I’d like to suggest that this particular characterization of competition is both misdirected, and ultimately self-destructive. Our competitors may well be our rivals and our opponents, but they are not necessarily our enemies -- rather, they are also in many ways our partners, who challenge us to become better and to improve ourselves by pushing us to higher and higher standards of performance. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a race to the bottom. Properly understood, competition can also inspire us to ever greater levels of accomplishment and achievement.

These two weekends around Thanksgiving are sometimes known as “Rivalry Week” -- it’s the time of the season when High School and College football teams typically square off against their traditional neighboring opponents, and when you’ve attended as many schools as I have, you can always find someone to root for this time of year. And with the notable exception of “The Game” between Harvard and Yale, my teams all did pretty well this year; but what I really want to talk about is something I noticed about the interviews with these young athletes which take place after the game. You almost never hear the victorious players bad mouthing their opponents, or boasting about their own superiority. Rather, they tend to talk about all the hard work which lead up to their success, and the two words which come up again and again are Discipline and Sacrifice -- two words which contain obvious religious connotations.

Discipline is basically the practice of being a Disciple: the rigorous, organized, and focused lifestyle of becoming a profoundly committed and devoted learner. And Sacrifice means literally to “make sacred” -- to willingly give up something of value to ourselves in support of a more important purpose. It is through the addition of these virtues of Discipline and Sacrifice that we transform ourselves from mere “Generous and Compassionate Understanding Souls” into real Philanthropists, whose love for our fellow human beings is transformed, through devoted commitment, into truly effective “Labors of Love.”


So, Discipline and Sacrifice. Compassion, Understanding, and Forgiveness. Empathy, and Trustworthiness. Gratitude and Generosity. I know, the list keeps getting longer and longer. But who ever said that becoming a “Faith-Filled Soul” was going to be easy? It’s work, hard work. But unlike so much of the work we do, like raking leaves and washing dishes and taking out the garbage, it is work truly worthy of our close attention and best efforts. And yes it’s also true that we don’t often end up with that satisfying pile of raked leaves at the end of our efforts. The rewards of this “Labor of Love” are often slow to accumulate and difficult to see.

Yet if we are truly honest with ourselves, and keep faith with one another; if we reach out to others in Compassion, Understanding and Forgiveness, and Generously express our Gratitude for this gift of life itself; if we cultivate the Discipline and are willing to make the Sacrifices that will guarantee that our “leap of faith” is successful, then the benefits to both ourselves and to the world will literally be immeasurable.


READING: A Wonderful Message by George Carlin

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. ; We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips , disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...


Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.

Remember, to say, "I love you" to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. A kiss and an embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for some day that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.

AND ALWAYS REMEMBER:

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.