“questions
that can make
…a life,
questions that have no right
to go away.”
Questions. We are a religious people that love them. We hold that revelation is not sealed, that the story of truth has not been completely told in any single scripture from the past…or in all of those scriptures together.
We try to hold ourselves open to new truth emerging within us and around us.
It follows then that the truth we have found so far must be tentative…partial…incomplete.
Liberal religion…and Unitarian Universalism…is therefore a faith without certainty.
But it is not a faith without convictions.
Because decisions must be made, direction chosen, commitments must be made.
To resist commitment would betray our hope to live lives of integrity.
The Beloved Community will not be created without commitment to some hope.
It is another paradox.
Truth is partial and tentative but commitments must be made. It is an ethical paradox…how to live faithful lives when certainty cannot be found.
Rebecca Parker writes:
“Your gifts
whatever you discover them to be
can be used to bless or curse the world.
…
You must answer this question:
What will you do with your gifts?
Choose to bless the world.”
Most of us get to any easy “yes…of course we will make that choice…to bless the world.
Many of us thought we were making progress…the Beloved Community perhaps not right around the corner…but we were moving in the right direction…more love being lived and more hope being felt.
But some questions call all of our comfortable assumptions into question.
How can the victories of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s and commitments to that dream of equality leave us needing to proclaim that Black Lives Matter? After more than 50 years?
How can global progress toward liberal democracy be in reverse gear as authoritarian leadership emerges in so many places…including here at home?
How can that be? What did we miss? What wrong turn did we take?
Rebecca Parker goes on:
The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will
A moving forward into the world
With the intention to do good.
It is an act of recognition,
A confession of surprise,
A grateful acknowledgement
That in the midst of a broken world
Unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide.
There is an embrace of kindness,
That encompasses all life,
Even yours.
And while there is injustice,
Anesthetization, or evil
There moves a holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love
Protesting, urging, insisting
That which is sacred will not be defiled.
Those who bless the world live their life
As a gesture of thanks
For this beauty
And this rage.
Those who bless the world live their life as a gesture of thanks…not a celebration of success…not triumph but gratitude grounds them.
Can gratitude ground you? Does gratitude ground you as you choose to bless the world?
Unitarian Universalism affirms both principles and sources. ..seven of each. Most people are more familiar with the principles: the inherent worth and dignity of every person…the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part…these I hope sound familiar to you.
But the sources are important as well. The Sources are what ground us: direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder…words and deeds of prophetic women and men…wisdom from the world’s great religions…Jewish and Christian and earth-centered traditions…
And Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and results of science and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
Humanism and the rationality it embraces are important pillars of our liberal faith.
The Humanist Manifesto, originally issued in 1933, described the goal of humanism: “as a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.”
Though I use different language that certainly is one way to describe the Beloved Community. A shared life in a shared world.
But, in describing this source, humanism is paired with a warning against idolatry… idolatries of the mind and spirit.
That was, I believe, in large part to protect humanism from the encroachment of creeds and dogmas based on faith rather than science.
Idolatry.
You remember that when Moses finally came down from the Mountain carrying those stone tablets with the 10 Commandments, he found that the people who would become the Israelites had forsaken Yahweh and were worshipping a golden calf…an idol.
Moses threw the tablets to the earth, shattering them and had to go back up the mountain and engage with Yahweh again…excuse me but you didn’t by any chance make a second copy?… once the people had seen the error of their ways.
Idolatry is the worship of false gods…or partial gods.
James Luther Adams was the great Unitarian ethicist of the late 20th century…
He wrote: “idolatry occurs when a social movement adopts as the center of loyalty an idol, a segment of reality torn away from the context of universality, an inflated, misplaced abstraction made into an absolute.”
Idolatry is the worship of the partial…rather than the whole.
Adams was born and taught ethics at Meadville/Lombard Theological School and at Harvard, but he studied in Germany during the 1930’s, during the rise of Nazism.. He watched Nazi propaganda transform German humanism into the horror of the holocaust.
Partial truth creates boundaries, sets up hierarchies and justifies violence.
It is not hard to lose balance. So many experiments and so much of history tells us that we have the capacity for violence…each of us. We deplore the hate filled rhetoric of our current national politics…but are we surprised that racism still thrives? Are you?
Is it any surprise that our systems work to keep the powerful in power?
We understand the dangers of idolatry…the dangers to all of us….at least we have the beginnings of an understanding.
This sermon has probably affirmed much that you believe, but it may not have tested you much…so far.
Here is the question:
How can we preserve our openness…we liberal religious folks…when we know that commitment is necessary?
How can we avoid the dangers of elevating the partial…and avoid an idolatry in which we cling not only to the liberal values of individual worth and personal freedom…but also to the particular culture in which we find our comfort.
How can we avoid an idolatry that allows some of us to interpret our truth…as THE truth.
Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd, speaks to this in her new book, “After the Good News: Progressive Faith Beyond Optimism.” I was with Nancy at a ministers’ retreat just two weeks ago.
An excerpt from her book is printed in the current issue of World Magazine from the UUA:
“There is an idolatry of expectation,’ she writes, “that drives us in the liberal churches to imagine that the dismantling of oppression [is] achievable through the limited mechanism of our own personal effort. Only hubris tells us that social change can be articulated on a spreadsheet and our anti-oppressive credentials can be listed on a flyer.”
If this sounds like the beginnings of a critique of liberal privilege…well, it is.
The issue is cultural expectation. An idolatry of expectation.
John Buehrens, another former UUA President, tells the story of the first Thanksgiving he and his wife and partner Gwen celebrated as a married couple. “It came close to being a complete disaster,” John writes, ‘not because of any differences in our theology [Gwen is Episcopal, John is UU] but because of different [cultural] expectations.
…From my point of view there was too much of everything (her family, my family, her friends, my friends); too much food (her family recipes, my family recipes); and too much fuss altogether. From Gwen’s point of view, the problem was not too much, but too little [of what she expected].
“I had been asked to carve, something I had never done before, but I was willing. I put on an apron, entered the kitchen, and attacked the bird with as much artistry as I could muster. And what reward did I get? Gwen burst into tears. In her family, the turkey is brought to the head of the table, grace is said, and then the head of the family carves [while everyone else watches].
‘So I failed patriarchy,’ John reports hollering later.”
Yes, he violated cultural expectations, which often are bound up with normative role expectations…
Idolatry…mistaking the partial for the complete…mistaking the specific for the universal…
One of our preachers last summer began a sermon talking about toilet paper. Some of you remember it, I’ll bet. Should the paper roll down the outside or along the wall on the inside. There clearly is no particular reason one is better than the other, Ann Landers notwithstanding. But put a roll of toilet paper in the wrong way…well.
Cultural expectations. Cultural truth.
“Liberal religious people not only tend to believe that we are called to perfection,” Nancy Ladd goes on, “but we also believe that we are already basically perfect. …
“Mutuality is a given. Perfection is nonsense,” she argues. “And so, the only motions we can choose are motions toward mutual inclusion or mutual destruction.”
Or in language I prefer, the only motions, the only decisions we can choose are toward mutual affirmation…toward love… or toward mutual harm.
Toward love or toward harm. Those of you who follow UU social media know that our faith has fallen short once again. People have been harmed…again.
I cannot preach a sermon about our cultural limitations and challenges without including this sad example of the harm that we are capable of doing.
I am a cis-gender male. That means that my physical body matches my gender. My pronouns are he, him and his.
The new issue of WORLD magazine includes not only Nancy’s excellent theological piece, but an article entitled “After L, G, and B” written by a cis-gender female writer.
The article includes significant inaccurate information. It centers the voice and the discomfort of the cis-gender writer rather than the struggles of transgender UU’s. And it was published despite the objections of transgender leaders who offered to facilitate a different kind of article centering the voices and experiences of transgender UU’s.
There is much wrong with the article that has been detailed by transgender leaders in our faith. Their voices are authoritative in these matters. Not mine.
Apologies have been issued by the magazine’s editor and by the President of the UUA. As they should have been.
There was no intent to harm. But harm was done. In these matters intent is not the issue. Impact is the issue.
We are left with more harm to heal and more relationmships to restore.
Nancy McDonald Ladd is arguing for a major change of culture in our faith. The article on transgender UU’s is proof positive that culture change is overdue.
Here at First Unitarian, we have work to do too. Our restrooms and their signs have not been updated in over 5 years. Bathroom access is an important right for all of us…including transgender members and friends.
And we are still in the early stages of recognizing the importance of the pronouns we use…and chose not to use.
We have work to do here…which we will. Because that is what we do here at First Unitarian and in Unitarian Universalism. We are not perfect…far from it…
But we take seriously our goal of Beloved Community.
This afternoon, some, I hope many of you, will attend the All Church Dialogue on Mass Incarceration. We will be joined by leaders from many of our justice-making partners.
As a church, we are already in relationships, outside our cultural comfort zones…relationships where hope can be found.
We are already learning the fragile art of hospitality…hospitality across real difference…and the demanding disciplines of followership.
We are already moving into the relationships which can help us avoid the idolatry of narrow (and self-serving) cultural expectations, already moving into relationships in which transformation can happen.
I hold these things up not to let us off the hook. Because we have only just begun to live into that change of culture. Not all of us are in the conversation yet. But some of us are. We have begun and in that beginning is the seed of hope.
Hope, Nancy McDonald Ladd, writes “Hope is the exact opposite of certainty. It does not presume an outcome for good or for ill. It lies in the waiting moment when the tug from both directions is not yet fully resolved and when a great many things are still possible. It moves in the humble spaces that open when we allow ourselves to be uncertain and thus not fully self-contained. It is the possibility, though not the certainty, of a better way.”
Choose to bless the world.
Idolatries of mind and spirit work against that blessing.
Both the theist and the atheist agree that ours are the only hands on earth and that if the Beloved Community is to be built…we will have to do the hard and messy work of construction.
But we will not do it alone and we will not always lead. Perhaps not even often.
…the choice is ours.
“…There [can be] an embrace of kindness,
That encompasses all life,
Even yours.
And while there is injustice,
…and evil
There moves a holy disturbance,
A benevolent rage,
A revolutionary love
….
Those who bless the world live their life
As a gesture of thanks
For this beauty
And this rage.
Choose to bless the world.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life and of Love.
No one told us that the road to Beloved Community would have so many false starts and reversals.
Our spiritual GPS did not show all of the switchbacks and dead ends.
No one told us that we would need to begin again…and again…learning along the way
No one told us how much harm we could cause,
Even when affirmation was our hope.
No one told us.
And yet we know when we hear the truth
That love might be real…if we make it so.
We know the truth…that love is our only hope.
Not a guarantee but a possibility…
A possibility worth living for.
So may it be. Amen.
Topics: Paradox