It's Almost Enough

This is the text of the Reflections I offered on Sunday, June 30, 2019 to the congregation I have served for the past 8 years.  It is the last Reflection I will offer as their Lead Minister.  It is also quite possibly the last sermon I will offer for quite some time, because I do not expect to seek out another pastorate.  Beginning in September I will become a student again as a Chaplain Resident at the University of Virginia hospital.  I will say that it's been quite a ride.

I’m going to tell you a couple of stories this morning.  Not the kind of stories we Unitarian Universalists usually tell one another; not the kind of stories to which we usually even give much credence when we hear others tell them.  Oh, to be sure, this isn’t true of all of us, yet as a generalization, and as we’re most often seen by people in the wider world, our elevation of and commitment to “The Rational” leads us to see such decidedly irrational stories as I’m going to be telling to be ... problematic at best.  Historically, at least, Unitarianian Universalism has encouraged a healthy skepticism; we’ve been largely agnostic at heart.  The English author W. Somerset Maugham once observed,

“A Unitarian very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and they have a very lively sustaining faith in they don’t quite know what.”

The first story happened a whole bunch of years ago, back when a primary tool for mass communication was “the list-serve.”  A colleague posted asking for help about a conundrum in which she’d found herself caught.  A member of the congregation she served had died recently.  A short time after the memorial service the deceased woman’s husband came to talk with her.  “Don’t tell my son any of this,” he said.  “We’ve always been extremely rational in our family – we believe that if you can’t see, touch, taste, hear, or feel it, it’s not real.  We don’t go in for any of that spiritual ‘woo-woo;’ we’re scientific rationalists all the way.  So, if my son knew about this he’d think I was losing it.” 

The “this” he wanted to talk to my colleague about, and which he wanted to keep from his son, was that since his wife’s death he’d continued to feel her presence.  Literally.  He knew, he knew, that it wasn’t a memory, or wishful thinking, or a delusion, or a psychotic break.  He still didn’t believe in any kind of “spiritual woo-woo” – ghosts, life-after-death, spirits.  He was still committed to logical rationalism and the proof of the senses.  Yet he also knew, knew, that he had been experiencing the undeniable presence of his wife even though she had died.  As you can imagine, this was throwing him for a bit of a loop.

But that wasn’t the problem my colleague was writing about.  She’d been able to talk with this man about his experiences, trying to help him make sense of them.  The problem came when the woman’s son came to talk with her.  He also requested that she not tell his dad about what he was about to say, because he knew his dad would think he was losing it.  But since his mom had died he’d been experiencing her almost physical presence.  It didn’t make any sense to him, it didn’t fit with anything he believed.  Still, he was rock-solid sure that these experiences were real, nonetheless.

So, that was her conundrum.  It was obvious that these two men needed to talk with each other about their experiences, yet she felt beholden to respect each of their requests not to tell the other.  So … what was she supposed to do?

Her question was pretty quickly and easily answered.  A whole bunch of us agreed that without breaking her promise she could say to either one – or both – something along the lines of:  “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about, and I know that you think your son (or father) would think you’re losing it, yet I’d seriously encourage you to take the risk of talking with them about it.  I think you owe it to your relationship with each other and with your wife (or mother); I also think you might be surprised by the response you’d receive.” 

As I said, her question was quickly taken care of, yet the thread that grew out of it went on for several months, as I remember.  And that’s because, slowly at first, person after person posted something that began like, “I’ve hardly ever told anyone about this, but …”  They’d then go on to tell the story of something rather “unbelievable,” something that didn’t align with our profession’s much touted rationality, yet which the person knew with every fiber of their being was true.  Some confessed that they’d actually never told anybody about this thing; one even noted, “I’ve never even told my wife about this.”  Yet on and on the litany went – post after post, day after day, story after story – experiences that didn’t make sense yet which the person who’d experienced it knew in their core were real.

We may be inclined to disbelieve this kind of thing, yet I’d remind you of the words Shakespeare had Hamlet say to his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  More recently it’s been observed, “The universe is not only more strange than you imagine, it is more strange than you can imagine.”  I’d always believed that it was the scientist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke who coined that phrase.  This week, though, I’ve learned that it actually goes back to a passage in the 1927 essay “Possible Worlds” by the British-Indian physiologist, geneticist, evolutionary biologist, and mathematician, J. B. S. Haldane:

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.”

The title of this sermon is, “It’s Almost Enough …,” and it comes from one of my own experiences.  (One of my own stories.)  In 2001 I was enrolled in the Spiritual Guidance program of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.  (That’s the same program Wendy Steeves, the Office Assistant here, recently completed.)  The program is largely done at-a-distance, but all of the participants come together for a 9-day retreat once in each of the two years.  There was a lot of instruction, a lot of prayer, a lot of silence, a lot of time for contemplation -- and a whole lot of “spiritual woo-woo,” that irrational stuff that’s eschewed by so many UUs. 

On one of the first days of the retreat we were given a prayer exercise.  It’s Shalem’s perspective that prayer isn’t something we do.  Rather, God is always praying in us, and what we do in what we call prayer is to quiet ourselves enough to hear God’s prayer in us for us.  I’ll note that Shalem is decidedly ecumenical in orientation, even with their deep openness to other faith traditions and spiritual perspectives.  Still, a theistic perspective is core to their understanding of life (the universe, and everything), so the concept of “God” is foundational to them – albeit not with its most common understanding.  Anyway …

In this exercise we were asked to try to find an “inner place of peace … a mood of meditation,” and to allow the thought (or feeling) of a person we knew well to rise into our consciousness.  In other words, to listen for who God might be praying for in and through us.  When we felt that we knew the who, we were then to again try to quiet ourselves and listen for the what, to listen for what God’s prayer might be for that person.  After a little while we were then invited to do the same thing for someone we didn’t know all that well, and, then, finally, for someone we were having some kind of difficulties with.

When I was focusing on someone we didn’t know that well, one of the other participants kept coming up. I saw her in my mind’s eye, standing with Jesus.  He knelt in front of her and she put her hands on his head.  She then sunk to her knees, and the two embraced as they both began to cry.  (Weird, right?)

I honestly don’t think I’d even said more than a couple of words to this woman by this point in the retreat, so you can imagine it was with a little trepidation that I approached her during a break to tell her about this “vision” (if you will) and ask if it meant anything to her.  She looked really shocked.  She said that some years ago she’d had a hands-on healing ministry but had gotten scared by something and had stopped.  We’d been told to come to the retreat with a question to ponder – her’s was whether she should start again.  She felt that the vision I’d had during prayer was at least a pointer toward her answer.

A few days later someone came up to me and said that in her prayer that morning I kept coming to mind, along with the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord.”  The hymn draws on a story from the Hebrew Scriptures in which the character of God keeps calling out to a young Samuel by name.  Each time Samuel answers, “Here I am, Lord.”  This was also the hymn we sang a lot at the Methodist church camp the year I first felt my call to ordained ministry.  My question for discernment was whether I should remain in the ordained ministry.  This person’s prayer, though she could have had no way of knowing it, was a pointer for me toward my answer.  (And here I am I, 18 years later.)

Stuff like that happened a lot that week – prayers being answered, needed messages given and received, we even had a couple physical healings.  A whole lot of “spiritual woo-woo.”  At the time I considered myself a Zen/Taoist/neo-Pagan/historically Christian/currently atheistic Unitarian Universalist, so all of this didn’t fit with any of my “philosophies.”

The cohort with whom I went through the program consisted of Catholic nuns and priests, pastors from various Protestant traditions, lay people, a staunchly rational atheist humanist psychiatrist, and a Zen/Taoist/neo-Pagan/historically Christian/currently atheistic Unitarian Universalist.  Early on I became good friends with two of the other participants – a Baptist clergyman and a Presbyterian laywoman.  (I’m glad to say that we’re still friends all these years later.)  I don’t remember any longer which of us coined the phrase, but whoever said it, it stuck.  Whenever we’d hear one of these stories about something “queerer than we can imagine,” we’d reply, “You know … it’s almost enough …”  Actually, the full phrase was, “You know … it’s almost enough to make you believe in God.”

Physical healings; seeing/hearing answers to questions we didn’t know were being asked by people we’d never met before; miracles, for want of a better word, both big and small … and we’d say, somewhat ironically, that these were almost enough to make one believe in God.

I know, I do know, that “God” is one of those words many UUs don’t want to hear in their sanctuaries during Sunday services.  It’s meaningless.  It’s harmful.  The fourteen times we uttered it during the Opening Hymn, and the eight or so times Adam said it, were more than enough for some of us to last a year or two.  The Sunday after Virginia legalized same sex marriage I put on the altar two placards that had been created for a protest planned that were no longer needed.  One said, “All Love Is Equal;” the other said, “God is Love.”  So strong is the allergy to traditional “God language” among some of us that I know at least one member of this congregation came in that morning, saw the sign on the altar with the word “God” on it, and then turned around and left in disgust.

I do understand that what has been and still is so often referred to by that word, “God,” is utterly meaningless and has been used to inflict great harm.  Yet I also know the philosophical definition of the word:  “God” is, “that than which no greater can be conceived.” This means that whatever “God” is, it’s the greatest, the best, the most awesome, the most life-affirming, the most expansive … it’s that for which no greater attribute can be conceived.  The way the word “God” has been and is still so often being used is incredibly limited and limiting.  The way the word “God” is all too often (mis)understood simply can’t be what that words is really pointing to because it’s so easy to imagine something greater.  And this means that those understandings of “God” simply can’t be what “God” is.  The word “God,” when properly understood, is so unlimited that no less an authority than Saint Augustine said, “if you can understand it, if you can comprehend it, it’s not God.”  (Si comprehendis non es Deus.)

When I did my chaplaincy training all those years ago my supervisor told us what she’d say when a patient told her they didn’t need a chaplain’s visit because they didn’t believe in God.  “Tell me about this God you don’t believe in,” she’d say.  “I probably don’t believe in that God, either.”  That “God” isn’t what “God” is.  And if that “God” isn’t God, then God might after all have meaning even for us skeptical, agnostic, rational UUs who “[disbelieve] almost everything that anybody else believes, and [who] have a very lively sustaining faith in [we] don’t quite know what”

In his address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in 1838 Ralph Waldo Emerson asked those freshly-minted ministers,

“In how many churches, by how many prophets, tell me, [are people] made sensible that [they are] an infinite Soul, that the heavens are passing into [their] mind; that [they are] drinking forever the soul of God?”

Not given dogma or stern warnings, but told that they are, themselves, intimately a part of what God is; that they are inseparably part of something truly larger than themselves.  The answer is “not in too many” Unitarian Universalist churches today, I’m afraid.

And in his essay Nature St. Ralph described an experience he had when he was,

“Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball [I love that phrase!]; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

In how many churches, by how many prophets, are we told that we are “part or parcel” of God?

I believe it was the first sermon I preached during candidating week for the first congregation I served which some encouraged not to give.  It was called “A Feather on the Breath of God,” a phrase used by the Catholic saint Hildegarde of Bingen to describe herself.  “Don’t talk about ‘God’ right out of the gate,” some people advised.  “It doesn’t go over well.”  (Yet here I stand, 25 years later.) 

Since I started out talking explicitly about God it seems right to talk explicitly about God in this last sermon, too.  Truth be told, I’ve done so in many, many sermons over the years since – maybe even in most of them, honestly.  I didn’t always use that word; you may not have even noticed.  But I did.  That’s because when we talk about “God,” we’re really talking about the Ultimate Reality in which, through which, and by which we live.  What a child once called “the Really Real,” in which, as the Apostle Paul put it, we “live, and move, and have our being.”  When we talk about “God” we’re talking about that which “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together” (to quote the esteemed theologian Obi Wan Kenobi).  We’re talking about, really, the only thing that’s really worth talking about – because that toward which the word “God” points is not some angry and judgmental anthropomorphic cosmic cop on the lookout for any infraction.  No.  When we talk about God we’re talking justice, we’re talking about truth, we’re talking about life, we’re talking about love.  What else should we be talking about?

Look around you.  Really open your eyes and look around you.  Look at your own life.  What do you see when you do?  A child’s open smile.  The warm touch of the person you love, and who loves you, most in all the world.  Leaves rustling on the wind when a stultifyingly hot day shifts with an incoming storm.  The pastel pinks and blues of sunrise; the vibrant crimson and azure of sunset.  The realization that you’ve found an answer for which you were seeking.  The courage to act on it.  Comfort in times of your own brokenness; strength when others need it from you.  Beauty, even in the presence of brutality.  The healing of body, mind, and spirit … even when there is no “cure.”  People who challenge our complacency; people who help point the way when we feel lost; people, plain and simple, other people.  Animals, plants, rivers, rocks, stars.  Moments of clarity about what really matters most.  Every breath we take.  (Every move we make.)  The sound of music.  The sound of silence.  The sound of life lived well, of life lived poorly, of life lived the best we can.  The sound of life lived in love, and love lived in our lives. 

All of that is real.  Really real.  All of it shows us, grounds us in the truth that, as I’ve been saying for years, “we are one human family, on one fragile planet, in one miraculous universe, bound by love.  All of it revealing the truth that we are not alone; the truth that in the end justice will prevail.  All of it reminders of the twin truths that life is stronger than death and that love is stronger than anything.  All of it God.

Look around you; really look around you, my friends, and really see.  And you know what?  It’s almost enough …

Pax tecum,

RevWik

On Justice, Truth, and Peace

This is the text of the reflections I offered on Sunday, May 5, 2019 in the congregation I serve here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Rabban Simeon ben Gamliel whose words are at the heart of the piece the choir just sang, was a Jewish sage and leader who lived a little less than 2,100 years ago. Rav Muna, the other rabbi quoted in the choral piece, was one of the two rabbi who edited an early version of the Talmud, known as “The Talmud of the Land of Israel.”  Commenting on the teaching of ben Gamliel that “on justice, truth, and peace the whole world stands,” Rav Muna said something that Amy Bernon didn’t include in her song.  He said that in truth, those three things are not three separate things, wholly distinct from one another.  Rather, he taught, those three things are really only one thing.  That’s why, as she quoted, “where justice is done, truth is done, and peace is made.” 

This put me in mind of another saying that has this same interlocking progressive structure.  It’s actually from our Unitarian kin in Transylvania.  I imagine that our friend the Rev. István Török leads the members of our partner congregation in Olteviz in saying this with some regularity:

Hol hit—ott szeretet
Hol szeretet—ott béke
Hol béke—ott áldás
Hol áldás—ott Isten
Hol Isten—ott szükseg nincen

Elizabeth North, the Director of Music at our congregation in Concord, Massachusetts and a Unitarian Universalist composer extraordinaire, set this text to music.  It’s #1043 in the teal hymnal. (I’ll note that Beth took a little liberty with the last line):

Where there is faith there is love
Where there is love there is peace
Where there is peace there is blessing
Where there is blessing there is God
Where there is God there, there is no need.

Let’s sing that together …

Do you see the pattern?  Where justice is done, truth is done – they’re one and the same.  And where justice and truth are, peace is made.  If faith exists, then hope exists, and love exists, and peace exists, and blessings abound, and God – however you conceive of that Sacred Something, that Unlimited Love that undergirds all that is – where that is, we have all we need (which is the original last line).

For the longest time I’ve had a magnet on my refrigerator with words taken from the writings of Lau-Tzu.  It also has this same understanding of the simultaneity, the essential, fundamental equivalency of what might seem to be different things. I’ll bet that a number of you know it:

“If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.” 

I did a lot of research for these Reflections – facts and figures, Jewish history, world history, current events …  I’ve thrown all that out.  (Although I will post that version on my blog next week for those of you who are into that sort of thing.)  I threw all of that because as I wrote I kept hearing a little voice in my head.  It was our Associate Minister, Rev. Alex.  Her voice was encouraging me not to tell you things you already know – about how if we look around us there seems to be so little evidence of justice, truth, and peace in our world today.  “They know that,” she said in my head.  “They’re already living with that, living in that.  What they need is to have some thoughts about what to do with that.”  And she’s right.

What do we do when we live in a society, and increasingly a world, where injustice can seem to be the norm, where truth appears to be under attack, and where peace is hard to find?  If on these three things the whole word stands, what do we do when those supports are looking increasingly unstable? 

Well … if justice, truth, and peace are not three separate things but only one thing; and if faith, love, peace, blessing, and that Holy Whole in which “we live and move and have our being” co-exist; then for there to be any of them in the world, they must first be alive in our hearts.

So … how do we bring these needful things to life and nurture them in ourselves?  We cultivate them.  We work at it.  Sorry, but there’s no other way.  No shortcut.  We have to work at it.  We make choices day-in and day-out, responding to the situations we find ourselves in rather than reacting to them out of our cultural conditioning.  We ask ourselves again and again, “What is the truth here?  What does justice look like in this encounter?  What would Peace do?”  (WWPD)

This morning I’m going to suggest three things, three ways that we can do the work of developing peace in our hearts.  Although justice, and truth, and faith, and love, and all of those things are needed in our world, I think peace provides a good model of how to respond to our own heart’s need of them. 

So … three things we can do to cultivate, to develop, to strengthen peace in our hearts:

First, we can put ourselves into direct contact with beauty.   We’re surround by beauty here right now – after the service wander around the sanctuary and take in Marissa Minnerly’s paintings.  On the drive, or the walk home, grey though the sky is today, look at the flowers you pass.  Really notice them, how their colors pop.  Let their beauty into you.  Go out into the woods, get onto a river or lake, drink deep the natural world.  Look into the eyes of a loved one, listen to their voice, reminisce about the good times you’ve had and about all the good times to come (as Willie Nelson says in one of his songs).  For that matter, listen to music.  Music is a great way to put yourself in the presence of beauty.

I have to pause here a moment to express my deepest appreciation to the choir, to Scott, to James.  I often hear clergy colleagues bemoaning the fact that they so rarely get to worship themselves, because they’re so often facilitating worship experiences for others.  I tell them that I get to worship every single Sunday.  St. Francis of Assisi is remembered as saying to his companions, “Preach always.  When necessary, use words.”  Each and every Sunday I get to – we get to – hear powerful preaching and profound sounds of prayer.  I’ll let you in on a secret:  when Scott plays a Prelude, or James plays the Musical Meditation, or whenever the service switches from words to music, I forget all about all y’all.  I don’t give you another thought.  I just open myself and let the beauty of the music wash over me, flow through me, and I revel in the mastery we’re experiencing.  That is worship here for me, and even though I think that from time to time the preacher has something worth hearing I know that many of you feel as I do. 

I do also want to put in a good word for words, though.  I was brought up by parents who shared with their kids a love of words, and to this day a well-crafted sentence brings me joy.  A few years back my friend and mentor, the Rev. Gary Smith, served on the panel that interviewed candidates for the position of Professor of Homiletics at the Starr King School for the Ministry, our seminary out in Berkley, California.  He told me that there were two questions he asked each prospective professor:  who is your favorite poet, and what was the last novel you read?  He asked these not only because if you’re going to make your living with words – which we preachers do – then you should regularly engage with the work of others who share the craft.  He also thought it important because both poetry and fiction are acts of imagination, of taking the world as it is and opening it up, exploring it in new ways, creating something revelatory.  Poetry and (good) fiction are beautiful in a very deep sense of that word.  And they are avenues for that direct contact with beauty that can help us cultivate peace in our hearts.

My second suggestion is to regularly do things that fill us up.  Modern life can be so … draining.  It can take so much out of us, the day-in day-outness of our lives.  We can go for long periods of time – for some of us extremely long periods of time – without having the opportunity to replenish our souls, our spirits.  The things we’re doing may be really important, even enjoyable, yet the often pressured pace depletes the peace we, and the world, so desperately need.  For there to be peace in the world there must be peace in the heart. 

The concept of “extroverts” and “introverts” is often misunderstood, seeing “extroverts” as people who like people and “introverts” as people who … prefer their cats.  It’s not that at all.  There are a great many people who are introverts who really like being around people, and extroverts who enjoy being alone.  The real differences is that an introvert’s spiritual/emotional battery is refilled by solitude, while the inverse is true of extroverts – they get charged by being with others.

So for those of us who are introverts, we need to find time, make time, to be alone, and to be alone with nothing to do.  No laundry, no shopping for groceries, no making of lists.  Of course, we can do those things if doing them feeds us.  The point here is, as one of my spiritual teachers put it, “don’t do anything that you have to do, that you feel obligated to do.”  So make time for this solitary not-doing regularly.  Not every once-in-a-while when the opportunity presents itself.  Regularly.  Frequently.  We should schedule it in our day timer.

For those of us who are extroverts, we need to schedule time to hang out with people we enjoy.  And I don’t mean those social events we kind of have to go to, parties (or meetings) we feel obliged to attend, those gatherings that have some kind of purpose to them.  I mean just hanging out for the sake of hanging out.

Making the time and space for those things that fill our spirits, along with putting ourselves, regularly, into direct contact with beauty – these things can help us to develop the peace in our hearts that is essential if we’re to survive these times we’re in.

One last thing.  (And given my background as a magician, juggler, fire-eater, escape artist, and clown you should probably be expecting this one.)  Play.  “Life’s too mysterious,” a greeting card said, “don’t take it serious.”  Find a young child and get down on the floor and play with them.  Heck, get down on the floor and play even if there’s no child anywhere around.  From the floor there’s an entirely different perspective on things.  Go to kids movies – superhero films come immediately to my mind, of course, but Toy Story 4 and The Secret Life of Pets 2 are coming out soon.  Do something silly because it’s silly.  A therapist I know (who I consider a rabbi, a wise sage) told me once that he’d like to write a book about how our lives could be so much healthier if we’d try to laugh, really laugh, full-throated, no-holds-barred laugh at least once a day.  He said that he worked in a group setting he made it a practice for the staff, and that it made all the difference.  (When I told him about how much our staff laughs when we’re together he was impressed, even envious, and said that we must be doing something right.)

So .. to cultivate peace in our hearts, in our lives, we can ourselves into direct contact with whatever we find to as expressions of Beauty – wherever we find them.  We can take time, make time, to do what (re)fills our spirit, taking care to avoid doing anything that we feel like we have to do, are supposed to do, feel obligated to do.  And we can play, be silly, laugh – early and often.  These three things can help us to create peace in our hearts without which there cannot be peace in the home, among neighbors, in the cities, in the nations, or in the world; without which the world doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Amen.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Grace

This is the text of the reflections I offered to the congregation I serve in Charlottesville, Virginia on Sunday, February 17, 2019.

The choir just sang what is easily one of the most recognizable hymns ever composed.  (And the arrangement was by our own Scott DeVeaux.)  “Amazing Grace” was written in the mid-1700s by a preacher named John Newton.  As a young man Newton served as a mate on a slave ship where he, “gained notoriety for being one of the most profane men the captain had ever met. In a culture where sailors commonly used oaths and swore, Newton was admonished several times for not only using the worst words the captain had ever heard, but creating new ones to exceed the limits of verbal debauchery.”  (Wikipedia)

One day the ship was caught in a storm so violent, that everyone was certain the ship would be capsized.  Newton and another mate actually lashed themselves to the ship’s pump so that they could keep working – which they did for hours – without fear of being washed overboard while doing so.  This was a realistic concern.  Newton had watched a fellow crew member swept off the ship from the spot where he, himself, had been standing just a few moments earlier.  When Newton told the captain his plan to tie himself to the pump, he reportedly said, "If this will not do, then Lord have mercy upon us!"  He later said that it was during that storm that he began his turning from the life he’d been living, to the one which saw him ordained a priest in the Church of England and author of “Amazing Grace.”

The turn was a long, slow one, though.  He continued to serve on slaving ships, eventually becoming a captain, and never saw nothing wrong with this abominable, abhorrent trafficking in human beings.  “He admitted that he was a ruthless businessman and [an] unfeeling observer of the Africans he traded.  Slave revolts on board ship were frequent.  Newton mounted guns and muskets on this deck aimed at the slave quarters.”  [Excerpted from the essay about Newton on the website The Abolition Project.]

Many years later, though, after he had left the slave trade and had become a committed Christian, he also became an ardent abolitionist fighting against the he had, himself, both participated in and profited from.  The lyrics of the first verse offer something of a personal testimony to the salvific power of grace.

Now, “grace” is one of those words to which some UUs have an almost allergic reaction.  Perhaps that’s because it’s so intimately connected to two other, for some, problematic words – “sin,” and “God.”  I’m going to set “God” aside for a today, but I do want us to consider the word, “sin.”  And I want to talk about “sin” because I think that the Christian concept of “Grace” can’t really be understood without understanding the concept of “Sin.” 

Ready?

If there’s one thing that many UUs have as much problem with as we do the idea of “God,” it’s “Sin.”  That’s because we know what “Sin” means; we know what being called a “Sinner” means.  It means that we’re a “loathsome insect … ten thousand times as abominable … as the most hateful, venomous serpent.” 

Those phrases come from a sermon delivered by the ever-cheery Johnathan Edwards titled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  Here is perhaps the most famous passage:

“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.”

I told you he was cheery.  I’ve really got to read a little more:

“You have offended him [and that’s God, again] infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not got to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God provoking his pure eye by your sinful, wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.”

Hearing this kind of rhetoric from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, it is possible, of course, that some of you think you have done so.  See, we don’t talk about “sin” because we “know” what it means:  It means that God – the ultimate Pater Prosecutorial – is constantly watching for us to make the slightest slip so that he – always “he” –  can come crashing down on us with all the authority of … well … of God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and all Things Visible and Invisible.  It means that we are not only “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” but that we’re, “worthless in the eyes of a judgmental God.”

 

And we “know” that “sin” is not just an existential state, it is also a laundry list of things – both general and very specific – that we shouldn’t do.  (Because it would make us even more loathsome and abhorrent, I guess.) 

I came across a blog post this week with the title, “A List of Sins from the Bible.” 

“Idolatry, greed, covetousness, love of money, gluttony, complaining, not loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, tempting God, high-mindedness, disobedience, witchcraft, lover of self, putting family, friends, job, or anything else above God including food, money, sports, inter [sic], TV, Internet pornography, movies, cars, attachment to riches or material goods and dozens of other things.

”

The author, Jack Wellman, an Evangelical Pastor, was just getting started.  He goes on to list a a great many more things that God is on the look-out for, more than a few of which I am sure we here this morning, “sinners” that we are, are now or have been engaged and entangled with.  It’s worth mentioning, that there are several things on Pastor Wellman’s list which we, good UUs that we are, would consider virtues, things to be proud of.  Yet for most of us even those that we’d aren’t good aren’t things we think should condemn someone to the eternal fires of hell – if we believed in “hell,” of course.

I want to be really clear here – I’m not for a moment suggesting that this is how all Christians understand the concept of “sin.”  Yet there’s no question it is precisely the way that word is often used.  But whenever I hear that word being used that way I want to say, “Hello.  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my fa …”  No.  Wait.  It’s that other great line.  I want to say, “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

There are actually seven different words used in the original Greek of the Christian scriptures which are translated into the single word, “Sin.”   Each has a different meaning, nearly all of which have gotten lost in that unfortunate simplification and which, together, paint an entirely different picture than we have been led to believe.

One is a term from archery that means, “to miss the mark.”  Sinning can be understood, then, simply as missing the mark.  Nothing “abominable” about it at all.  We all do it.  We try.  We try our best.  And sometimes we just don’t quite hit what we were aiming for.  We don’t keep our cool as much as we’d hoped we would have; we forget that we’d meant to give someone the benefit of the doubt; we join in when others are speaking snarkily about someone even though we’d promised ourselves we’d stop doing that.  We miss the mark.  We “sin.”

Some of the other Greek words mean, “diminishing what should have been given full measure,” (or, maybe, not giving it our all).  Then there’s “ignorance when one should have known;” “refusing to hear and heed God's word,” (or, let’s say, ignoring that still, small voice of inner wisdom even when it’s more like shouting at us).  My favorite of them all is, “lying down when one should have stood.” 
Is there anybody in here this morning who has never behaved in ways that could be described in at least one of these ways?  Oh man, I surely have.  I’ve missed the mark; I’ve held back and not given everything I had; I’ve done things that I should have known not to do; and oh how many times I’ve lay down when I should have – and could have – been up and doing something. 

You see … the concept of “sin,” when properly understood at its spiritual core, is not all that much about judgement.  It’s really an observation.  I have two eyes, one nose, and one mouth.  I have a tattoo on my right arm.  I breathe air and can’t breathe under water.  I often miss the mark.  I sometimes do things when I really should have known better.  I don’t always give everything I can.  I sometimes drop down, out of sight, when I really should be present and counted for.  And except for the the tattoo, I’d wager that’s true for just about all of us, true for just about anyone we might ever meet.  That’s really what it means to say that we’re all “sinners.”

Well … what about “grace?”  “Sin” and “Grace” really go hand in hand.  They should, at least, because each is needed to make sense of the other.

I don’t know about you, but I know that I struggle with “Imposterism.”  That’s the psychological condition, sometimes called “Imposter Syndrome,” in which I look at myself and all of my accomplishments and am afraid that I’m really just a fraud one slip from being found out.  A few years back, we brought in a facilitator to lead a weekend retreat as the kick-off to a multi-session program called “Beloved Conversations” that was designed to help groups deepen their ability to talk about how racism plays out in the world, and in our own lives.  At the end of the first night of the retreat all of the participants sat in here – which is actually a really powerful thing to do at night.  We sat in here and went through a process that led us to our deepest, core, most fundamental fear.  There were some really impressive people here that night – if I were to read off a list of them, those who’ve been around a while would recognize a veritable who’s who of the best and brightest.  The room was full of really highly successful people, and just about every one of us said pretty much the same thing when we were asked to share – some version of, “I’m afraid that if people really knew me, knew the real me, that they wouldn’t love or respect me anymore and that I’d be abandoned.”  Just about every … single … person.

I’m not good enough.  I’m just not good enough; I don’t deserve this good fortune.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve this success.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve to see my dreams come true.  I’m not good enough; I don’t deserve to be happy.

Yes?

The deepest spiritual understanding of the concept of “sin” says, essentially, “Okay.  So what?  Nobody’s good enough!  Everybody is fallible!  Everybody’s flawed!  Everybody fails!  What makes you so special that you think you’re the only one who secretly isn’t a good enough friend, or lover, or parent, or racial justice warrior, or whatever.  Get over yourself!  We’re all in that same boat.” 
The concept of “sin,” no matter how twisted it has become through the years, is simply telling us that we’re right, that we’re not perfect, and that no one else is either.  This means we can stop wasting energy comparing ourselves to somebody else who we’re convinced is somehow better than us.  We can let ourselves off the hook, because nobody’s got it all together.

That’s the lesson of “sin.” 

The lesson of “grace” is that none of that matters, because we live in a world of beauty even with our flaws.  People love us even with our imperfections.  In the theistic context from which these terms come, “grace” means that God loves us not because we’re good enough to deserve it, but because God is good enough to casually and extravagantly exude love like the sun just shines.
“Grace” tells us that we don’t need to earn our place in the Universe.  As the well-known poem “Desiderata” put it, “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

Sin and Grace.  We aren’t perfect, but we don’t need to be perfect to be happy.  We miss the mark, but we don’t need to hit the bullseye every time to be “worthy” (whatever that means).  We don’t always give it our all, don’t always show up, don’t always listen to our own inner wisdom, but we don’t need to do any of that to be loved.  We are sinners, among sinners, but that’s not a judgement, just an observation.  And it’s okay, because grace doesn’t require us to be anything other than what we are. 
Now … isn’t that amazing?

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Best Place to Hide From God

This is the text of the reflection I offered on Sunday, March 5, 2017, to the congregation I serve -- Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian Universalist.  As always, you can listen to it if you prefer.

It was during the first few years of my first settled call that I first started working with a spiritual director, and this guy was the real deal -- spiritual director, Episcopal priest, and Jungian analyst.  A seeker’s trifecta.  I remember one day when we were talking about the wrestling I was doing in my spiritual life – wrestling with the powerful pull of that "sacred something," combined with a concomitant dread bordering on terror.  I remember at some point saying, "It's not supposed to be this hard, is it?  I'm a minister, for God's sake!"  "Hadn't you heard?" he replied.  "They say that the best way to run away from God is to join the ministry."  I’ve heard this now, a number of times in the years since.  I've said it more than once myself.  I've also heard it put another way:  the best place to hide from God is in church.

Before I go on let's assume that I'm as Unitarian Universalist as you are, so it's not likely that I'm talking about that "God."  And I do understand that some of us "God" is not only something we don't believe in, even more, it's a word with literally no meaning.  For some of us, talking about "God" is like talking about "unicorns with Ph.D.s in astrophysics" -- it's not a question of "belief" or "unbelief."  It's an issue of nonsensicalness. 

So don't call it "God," then.  That's language that makes sense to me, that's meaningful to me, but if it's not for you, by all means, don't use it.  We sing "Spirit of Life" here most weeks.  Perhaps you can substitute that whenever I say, "God."  The UUA's Statement of Sources uses the fairly long phrase, "that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life."  For that matter, call it "The Force" -- "an energy field created by all living things [which] surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together."  In a book that collected children's descriptions of "God" there's one I love:  "the really real."

Whatever you call it, we're mostly likely talking about pretty much the same thing -- the beating heart at the heart of life; the Mystery; the aliveness, the isness of things; That Which Cannot Be Named Nor Known; the really real; ruach elohim; Life; Love; God.

So why would anyone want to run away from this?  Why would anyone try to hide from it?  Why would anyway feel "dread bordering on terror" at the thought of facing -- Life?  Love?  The heart of the heart of things?

In her wonderful book Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gives voice to at least one of the reasons in her description of the modern Christian church -- because it's dangerous.

"On the whole," she wrote, "I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches,” she says, “are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

"Children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. ... Ushers should issue life preserves and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews."  Sounds kind of frightening when you put it that way.  “[T]he sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  Have you ever noticed that just about the first thing angels say in every encounter they have in the Biblical accounts is, "Be. Not. Afraid."  That's the kind of thing you say to somebody who's scared silly. 

Why do people so often try to run away from, try to hide from, this experience I'm calling, "God?"  Because deep down we know -- we know -- that in such encounters we should be wearing crash helmets and life preservers.

"Absorption" is one of the things my Spiritual Director said people often fear -- the feeling that if we ever truly had a deep encounter with that "sacred something" we would find themselves ... absorbed.  A perhaps absurd, though not necessarily unhelpful analogy -- in the Star Trek universe there is a species known as the Borg, and everyone who encounters it is "assimilated," forcibly brought into The Collective that is the Borg. All individuality is erased, the life you've known is obliterated and, of course, "resistance is futile."  A somewhat less odd example comes from Buddhism.  It is said that when Siddhartha had his enlightenment experience he was tempted to remain in that bliss, rather than return to the world to teach.

Deep down we know – we know – that there’s the risk of being drawn out “to where we can never return.”  That, or changed.  Drastically, irrevocably changed.  In the Hebrew Scriptures Abram’s God changed his name to Abraham, more than a mere symbolic transformation; and in the Christian Scriptures, Saul’s God transforms him into Paul, transforms him into one who now championed what he’d only recently condemned.

There’s a Jesuit priest whose writings have always spoken to me.  His name was Anthony De Mello, and he was born and raised in India, so he brought something of his early Hinduism to his Catholicism.  I purchased his book Awareness with great eagerness to glean more of his wisdom.  Imagine my surprise to read this:

The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up.  The first step to waking up is to be honest enough to admit to yourself that you don’t like it.  You don’t want to be happy. […] I [am] saying that we don’t want to be happy.  We want other things.  Or let’s put it more accurately:  we don’t want to be unconditionally happy.  I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. […]  We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions.

When I was doing my Spiritual Direction training with the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, I had the opportunity to study with the great Gerald May.  He told the story of being in prayer, fervently committing himself to following God’s will.  He said that he “heard a voice,” and it asked him (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your wife?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “Would you follow my will if it meant giving up your career?”  “Yes, Lord.”  “What if you had to give up fishing?”  He said he never prayed that prayer again.

We run from deep, true encounters with the Holy and the Sacred because deep down we know – we know – that we might be called on to change, and we don’t want to change.  Not really.  Or, as Fr. De Mello noted, we want to change as long as we can keep doing this or that.  We say we want to change, transform, grow, evolve, yet whether we say it or not what’s really true is that we want to change, transform, grow, evolve on our schedule, under our conditions.  And we know – or, at least, we really, really fear – that that’s just not the way it works.

Earlier Leia told us the story of the boy with holes.  And let’s be honest, all of us have holes, don’t we?  All of us have spaces in our lives – in our hearts, in our souls – that feel empty.  Incomplete.  And because of these “missing” parts, the boy acted out in ways that were not, shall we say, in alignment with his “better angels.”  We know about that, too, don’t we?  Maybe we don’t try to sabotage other people’s fun, maybe we don’t try to interfere with other people’s lives … or maybe we do, but not consciously, or in such conspicuous ways.  But who here can say that they always act from the best parts of themselves?  Who here cannot say that it isn’t sometimes our holes, our wounds, our brokenness that direct our behavior?

So the boy in the story sets out to find completeness.  Wholeness.  (And there’s that lovely wordplay in the story that is etymologically accurate – hole, whole, and holy all share the same root; they’re a … whole … lot more connected than we probably often think.)  And the journey on which he embarks is not an easy one:

Wind whistled through his holes and blew him about.  Branches snagged him and stopped him short.  Vines grabbed him.  Animal sounds frightened him.  The river roared right at him; its spray splashed and soaked him.

Sounds a lot like a description of the spiritual journey, the journey of our own quest for deep completeness.  Wholeness.  Holiness even, maybe.  No wonder we try to run away from the call to embark; no wonder we try to hide from the summons.  Who would want to intentionally deal with all of that.  Life may not be perfect as it is, but it’s a darn sight better than that.  I may not feel entirely complete, but at least I’m somewhat comfortable.

But here’s the thing.  Despite the wind, and the branches, and the vines, and the threat of animals, and the roar and spray of the river, the boy journeyed on.  He persisted.

And he eventually came to that other village, where there was that other boy, that other boy who had his own holes but who was a complement to our hero.  The whole story is an allegory, of course, but that other boy isn’t really another boy.  If we take on this quest we’re not going to find another “us” out there, another person who will complete us.  (That kind of romanticism is best left on the silver screen.)

Yet even if there isn’t another “you,” or “me,” the promise of the spiritual journey is that there is that which will make us whole.  Make us holy.  I don’t believe that there’s anything that will fill all of our holes, yet that doesn’t mean they will always be nothing but empty space.  (How that works should be the subject of another sermon someday.)

For now, here, this morning, I just want to point out a problem I had with the story.  After the two boys merge into one, they say goodbye to the people in that second village.  That second hole boy leaves his home, and journeys back, now one with the first boy, to the first boy’s village. 

That doesn’t seem fair, does it?  Why didn’t the newly whole boy stay in the second boy’s village?  Why did he have to give up his life?  Why did the first boy get to return – transformed, yes, but able to resume his life more or less as it was?

I don’t believe he did.  I believe that there’s an untold epilog to the story.  I believe that, after returning home, and thanking that woman for her faith in him, this newly whole boy said his goodbyes as well.  He had to.  Having taken the journey, having found the completeness, the wholeness for which he searched, his adventure was really just beginning, and, so, he had to set off again, in search of new lands for he was, in truth, a new person.

And maybe, in the end, that’s what we fear.  Maybe that’s what we run from, what we hide from.  Because we don’t want to be new, at least not so new that we have to give up the old.  But that story is an allegory, and it may not mean exactly what it seems to mean. And the angels say, “Be not afraid,” and maybe they know something we don’t.

I’ll give Fr. De Mello the last words:

Spirituality means waking up.  Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep.  They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.  [This sounds a lot like our own Henry David Thoreau’s observation that “most live lives of quiet desperation,” and live lives that are not life.  De Mello continues:]  They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.  […]  [T]ragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep.

In this season introspection Christians call Lent, in this month when we, here, are exploring the idea of “risk,” let us take that risk of truly looking within, truly venturing in, of not running from but running toward.  Let us take the risk of the journey, of waking up, of seeing the beauty of “this thing we call human existence,” of discovering the holy wholeness of our hole-y lives.

Closing Words:

Our closing words are a poem from Mary Oliver.  It’s one you may be familiar with – “The Journey.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik