|
Home
Sermon Archives
|
Glory
Delivered January 28, 2007 by Ilona Forgeng
at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of New Bern.
Opening Words
The Duck, by Donald Babcock
Now we’re ready to look at something pretty
special. It’s a duck, riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf.
No, it isn’t a gull. A gull always has a raucous
touch about him. This is some sort of duck, and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn’t cold, and he is thinking things over.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic
, and he is part of it.
He looks a bit like a mandarin, or the Lord Buddha
meditating under the Bo tree.
But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a
philosopher. He has poise, however, which is what philosophers must have.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he
rests in the Atlantic
.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you. But he realizes it. And what does he do, I ask you? He
sits down in it! He reposes in the immediate as if it were
infinity—which it is.
He has made himself a part of the boundless by easing
himself into just where it touches him.
I like the little duck. He doesn’t know much, but
he’s got religion.
Readings
From the 1840 Covenant of the founders of the Unitarian
Movement:
Being
desirous of promoting practical goodness in the world, and aiding each
other in our moral and religious improvement, we have associated ourselves
together: not as agreeing in opinion, not as having attained universal
truth in belief or perfection in character, but as seekers after Truth
& Goodness.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
No
nation can live alone. No individual can live alone. We are all caught in
an inescapable network of mutuality. All I am saying is simply this, that
all life is inter-related. And we are all tied in a single garment of
destiny. Whatever affects one affects all indirectly.
Somehow
we are all tied together in this great system of humanity and for some
strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you
ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I
ought to be.
From Albert Einstein
A
human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in
time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as
something separate from the rest. Our task must be to free ourselves from
the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Albert Einstein, 1954)
Sermon
Over the years, in many ways, I have found much in
common between Unitarians and Alice in Wonderland. For both Lewis Carroll
and Unitarians, questions are more important than answers, as in “How is
a raven like a writing desk?” Isn’t our celebration of Christmas a
little like the Mad Hatter celebrating unbirthdays? Unitarians have
certainly been known to chase imaginary ideas down figurative rabbit
holes. We often fall asleep on sunny afternoons. Sometimes even here on
Sunday mornings. Most of us can easily believe six impossible things
before breakfast. And, like the Humpty Dumpty, when we use a word, it
means just what we choose it to mean. You may remember that he said when
he used the word, Glory, it meant, “there’s a good knock-down,
drag-out argument for you.” Alice complained that that wasn’t what
Glory meant at all. And Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, he said,
it means just what I choose it to mean. No more, no less.”
For six years now M&M has been meeting on
Thursday mornings to discuss books and writings with a religious theme.
But, like the Supreme Court’s take on pornography, most of us feel we
can’t define religion, but we certainly recognize it when we see it. So,
when we use the word, it means just what we choose it to mean at that
moment.
This actually has some practical difficulties. The
dictionary definitions of religion almost all say something about a belief
in supernatural beings, which lets out both Unitarians and Buddhists. That
can create a problem on April 15, since we would really like to be able to
deduct our contributions to this place on our income tax. The Secretary of
State in Texas tried to deny tax exemption to a new Unitarian fellowship
for just that reason. No god, no tax deduction.
Frank Hall, minister of the Unitarian Church in
Westport Connecticut says that UU isn’t a religion, but rather a way of
looking at religion.
Linda Hoddy, the minister of the UU church of
Saratoga Springs said that the origin of religion was when the first human
stood on a hill at night, looked up at the stars and said, “Holy
Shit!”
It has been said that philosophy is questions that
may never be answered, and religion is answers that can never be
questioned.
When the latest Building your own Theology class
began meeting, we quickly got hung up on that word, “Religion.” It was
very difficult for the group to make the distinction between religion in
the conventional sense, the Baptist, Pentecostal, Episcopal sense, and
religion as a common aspect of our humanity. For many of the participants,
in fact, the idea of being called religious was just short of heresy. Yet
these were all people who were meeting with, I think, a religious purpose
in mind. They were looking for an understanding of that common aspect of
our humanity.
Forrest Church was senior minister of our foremost
Unitarian Church, All Souls in New York City, where some of our music this
morning comes from. He is also one of our most respected writers and
speakers. His famous definition of religion is our human response to being
born and knowing we are going to die. He says, “We are not the animals
with tools or the animals with advanced language, we are the religious
animals.”
Religion is the human response to being born, and
knowing we are going to die. Knowing we will die, we try to give meaning
to our lives. Looking back on your life, is it a life worth living? Is it
a life worth dying for? It is up to each of us, knowing that life itself
brings death, we alone must build a clear understanding of our life’s
purpose—to prove that our lives are worth dying for. As a Unitarian, I
seek the meaning in my life, rather than the meaning of life.
Knowing we must die, we question what life means. As
religious liberals, we must each ask these questions, and as religious
liberals, we must each find our own answers. We may arrive at
non-religious answers, but the questions are religious questions: Who am
I? Where have I come from and where am I going? What is good? What is
evil? What is my purpose? Where do I find meaning? These are some of the
questions we address at length in Building your own Theology. Religious
questions that each of us must answer for ourselves.
Forrest Church also originated the idea of the
Cathedral of the World. This cathedral has hundreds, perhaps millions of
windows, each window telling its own story and each window illuminating
life’s meaning in its own way. As we stand together in the cathedral,
one light shines through all these windows, but each window changes and
adapts the light in its own way. The Hindu window, the Buddhist window,
the Native American window, my window, your window, each transmits
different colors and patterns. None of us can see the light directly; none
of us can look god straight in the eye. Each of us can only see part of
the mystery. The religious fundamentalists see the light through their own
window. They accept the light only through their own window and think that
theirs is the only window. Secular fundamentalists see all those windows
and all those different colors and patterns and lights and say there is no
true light, the light must not exist, and they dismiss it all, the
beautiful, the meaningful and the ugly.
What to do with so many windows, with all those many
patterns on the floor of our cathedral? Religious liberals try to see the
meaningful in the lights and the patterns of all these windows, and
religious liberals accept that no one window shows all the truth, but
every window has some of the truth. Some of the light that shines through
each these windows shines with our common values.
We understand that the truth lies not in the window
but in the light.
Carrying the Cathedral metaphor further, Forrest
Church says the cathedral is like Unitarian Universalism: Unitarian: One
Light, Universalism: Many Windows.
In early December John and I joined the Mackles to go
up to the Mountain, a Unitarian retreat in Western North Carolina. My
favorite minister, Davidson Loehr was speaking, and he invited everyone to
send him questions in advance. His doctoral thesis had been on the
philosophy of language, so it seemed a perfect chance to get a satisfying
definition of religion, perhaps one that would satisfy even the BYOT
group.
Davidson had two definitions. The first, which I
think is the definition of conventional religion, was “a prescribed set
of behaviors that govern how we live.” And I think that defines
conservative religions pretty well, Buddhist, Hindu, Tao, Catholic or
Baptist, certainly Orthodox Judaism. A prescribed set of behaviors that
govern how we live..
His second I found a satisfying definition for good,
liberal religion, the kind we try to practice here. Davidson
said that religion is a search for truths worth living by. A search for
truths worth living by. A search. Truths, plural, not THE truth. And
truths written in lower case. No holy, handed down TRUTH in capital
letters. And each of us has to decide which of our
truths are worth living by. What are those truths that have ultimate
value, that are, indeed, worth dedicating our lives to? What are those
truths that make our lives worth dying for? That is what we try to do
here. Find truths worth living by and working toward. Compassion.
Community, Freedom, Justice. Honesty. Harmony and Hope. Isn’t this what
we mean when we talk of taking Sunday into Monday? When we examine ideas
and concepts, and we find them worth living by and for and with, does that
not enrich our Mondays just as much as our Sundays.
We call ourselves religious liberals. Liberals,
Generous, Open Minded, Open Hearted, Open Handed. Tolerant, free,
Progressive, flexible, curious. Doctrinaire liberal is an oxymoron.
John Kennedy said, “if by a "Liberal"
they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new
ideas, someone who cares about the welfare of the people, if that is what
they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a
"Liberal."
But religious liberal, what does the religious part
mean? Being religious means an acknowledgement of our feelings of awe when
confronted with the mystery of the universe. Being religious implies a
moral concern for values that are universal and humane and accepting
responsibility to work to enshrine those values in our society. Being
religious means to understand the oneness of the universe of creation and
to treat creation as if it really is our home. Being religious means to
understand the commonality of our humanity, to understand that we are all
precious people and we need to treat each other as precious people. Being
religious means seeking out others, for it is in our togetherness that we
get to practice what it means to be human.
As religious liberals we are intellectually free to
come to our own understanding of life and creation. We take responsibility
for ourselves and we take responsibility for our own actions. We have no
Satan to blame when we do wrong, no God to thank when we do good, no
original sin to blame on Adam and Eve. We have only our own humanity and
the confidence that, with good will and with compassion and understanding
and forgiveness, we can improve at least our own small corner of the
universe.
As religious liberals we understand that we are
responsible for our own salvation, salvation from a wasted life, salvation
from isolation, salvation from not quite doing our best; we believe in
salvation by character, we know that we become what we value, we become
what we believe. Salvation for religious liberals is not salvation from
punishment for sin. Our humanness is punished by our sins, not for them.
The evil we do lives with us, and the good we do lives within us.
As religious liberals, we are open, open to new
truths, open to changing our beliefs as new facts emerge. As Unitarians we
believe that revelation is not sealed. We find new truths all the time. In
Alice in Wonderland, for example, or in Quantum Mechanics. David
Finkelstin said, “(P)hysics is, among other things, an attempt to
harmonize with a much greater entity than ourselves, requiring us to
formulate and eradicate first one and then another of our most cherished
prejudices and oldest habits of thought, in a never-ending quest for the
unattainable.” We religious liberals take our religion wherever we find
it, even from quantum mechanics. An attempt to harmonize with a much
greater entity than ourselves. A never ending quest for the unattainable.
To formulate and then eradicate first one and then another of our most
cherished prejudices.
As religious liberals, we are open to diversity,
treasuring our differences as well as our commonalities. We value our
diversity not just because we enjoy it, which we do, but because it
answers a human need, a need to be one with ourselves and with our common
humanity and we value diversity because being open to the wonderful
assortment humankind offers helps us feel at home in creation. Where we
provide a home for all, we provide a home for ourselves.
The next time someone asks you, “What do Unitarians
believe,” don’t worry about your elevator speech, don’t quote from
the seven principles, but say, “Unitarians aren’t about belief;
we’re about values.” Liberal religion is about a free search for
lasting, basic, human values. A search for truths worth living by. Liberal
religion is about those values and how we live by them, for them and
through them. We don’t ask what you believe
here, we ask what your values
are, and how those values shape your life. As Thomas Jefferson said, “It
is in our lives and not from our words that our religion must be
read."
Liberal religion is not about defining who we are in
narrow ways, distinguishing the saved from the unsaved, the worthy from
the unworthy, God’s people from all others. We draw a wider circle, we
think not only all of humanity is worthy of our concern, but all of
creation.
So, we are liberals. We are religious liberals in a
long, lovely tradition of religious liberalism. And we understand, as Dr.
King said, “No nation can live alone. No individuals can live alone. We
are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” And as Albert
Einstein said, “Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by
widening our circle of compassion.”
We can be spiritual alone, we can enjoy a walk in the
woods or we can connect with the cosmos within our own gardens. We can be
spiritual alone. But we can only truly be religious together. Together we
can provide the space, we can share, we can challenge, support and
encourage each other in our search for truths worth living for.
So I guess we need to keep meeting like this.
|
