In Fellowship

Pragmatism: Sermon for January 8, 2012

January 12th, 2012

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

William James’ biographer begins with the story of James in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Plagued by insomnia, he was awake just before five in the morning when the quake hit. He rode out the 48-second quake on his bed, and then went to find his wife, who was unhurt. Once he realized they were both safe, James ran out into the street. He spent the rest of the day talking to everyone he could about their experience of the earthquake: where they had been, what it was like for them, what they had seen and felt.

This is no surprise from the man who is the best known proponent of a philosophical approach called “pragmatism.” Pragmatism, and in particular the writings of William James, is one of my favorite theological and philosophical approaches. Pragmatism says, at its core, what matters is what we do–that belief will be shown through action. It says that the test of any belief is its consequent actions. It says that there is not one unified truth, but as many ways of experiencing the world as there are human beings. This is what I love about Unitarian Universalism. Our beliefs can be quite diverse, and our actions can still converge around the love within our fellowship community and the good we can do in the world.

At the core of pragmatism is the concept that our beliefs are shown through our actions. The issue of who believes what often takes center stage in our divided world. We believes that our beliefs divide us. But what do we believe, really? Take the example of two women interviewed in Pennsylvania, during the last presidential election, about whether or not they supported then-Senator Obama.

One woman looked right at the camera, and said with complete conviction that she thought Obama was an incarnation of the devil and would be terrible for America. She turned to her neighbor and said, “Don’t you agree?” And the neighbor looked at the camera and said no, she was going to wait and see what his policies were, and she might vote for him. The interviewer thanked them, and the women went back into their houses. We can imagine that the two women went on about their day and watched themselves on the evening news (Doherty).

Now the woman who believed that Obama was the devil stated her belief with every indication of really believing it. She was asked what she thought and she said it; there was no indication that she was lying or playing a joke. But in some sense, she must not really have believed it. If you believed that Satan himself was going to be incarnate in the president of the United States, it would not be all right with you for your neighbor to disagree with you on that matter. It would be a matter of the gravest concern, a matter that might prompt you to take whatever action you could to change the outcome.

Imagine that you are upstairs in your house at night and you become convinced that a strange person has entered your home downstairs. Maybe this person is a burglar; at any rate, you know they’re not supposed to be there. The nature of this belief would cause you to take immediate action. You might try to confront the person or scare them off. You might call the police. You might hide in the closet. Whatever your response, it would come as a result of an overwhelming belief that something was not as it should be. The belief that something was wrong in your house would have become real to the point of requiring action. Pragmatism is the philosophy which says that the test of our beliefs is the action we will take. Pragmatism would say that while the first woman in the interview is considering the possibility that Obama might be an incarnation of the devil, she doesn’t quite believe it yet, or she would be acting on it.

As I said, pragmatism was made most widely known by philosopher and psychologist William James, brother to the novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James. The word was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce and the ideas were explored by other friends of theirs, including George Santayana, whose poem we heard earlier. William James was a pioneer in the field of psychology in the late 19th century, and is also well known as a writer of philosophical and theological works. He pioneered the idea of a “stream of consciousness,” a flow of our ideas which was a more accurate way of understanding our minds than thinking that “mind” was a static thing. He believed that what we call our “mind” came to exist through the constant stream of experiences which make up our lives.

James arrived at his conclusions about the nature of belief and experience through his absolute commitment to the theory of evolution. He was interested in philosophy, theology and psychology that arose from the experiences of human beings. A creature’s experience in the world would select for adaptations and fit the creature for that world. When James looked at the animal kingdom, he saw that some creatures in it had consciousness and some did not. Therefore, James thought, consciousness must be an adaptive solution. We are not automata, with an observing consciousness along for the ride. And we are not divinely endowed to lord it over creation. The process of evolution has provided us with a faculty which can consider our experiences and options in time and make decisions which are not merely driven by sense experience. Each person’s consciousness is the hallmark of their free will to respond to the universe in the way that is right for them.

The freedom of this appeal to experience is bound, on the other side, by the limits of achieving a universal vision of reality. If each person interacts with the world in her or his own way, then it is hard, as an individual, to say anything conclusive about the nature of the universe itself. Many philosophies of James’ time were concerned with trying to explain life, the universe and everything. James was concerned with building a philosophy outward from the individual and collective human experience. And he was not going to leave out any experience, because everything that we perceive is part of what it means to be human.

In a way, our beliefs become our biography. What we believe becomes who we are. William James believed that part of what our mind does for us is help us select the stimuli in the world to which we wish to pay to pay attention. Animals with less consciousness, James believed, were required to pay attention to stimuli regarding food, shelter and safety. These things are still important to humans, but with the tool of consciousness, we can choose to pay attention to other things too. Even homeless people may create art, in other words, because having a mind allows people to choose to pay attention to beauty over shelter.

This concept of mind also suggests that our minds are an organ of our functioning, like other organs in our body. And our minds can function more or less well, just like other organs. Sometimes, the organ of our minds does not work as well as we wish it did. All of us have either experienced serious depression or known someone who has. I can think of a friend of mine who watched her marriage fall apart because she did not have the capacity, at that time, to take the steps necessary to improve her situation. It was as though she had a broken leg, and the thing she needed to do to heal was to hike a mountain.

Rather than see depression as a failure of the person, we can see it as a difficulty with the organ of the mind. A therapist can even use consciousness as a tool in treating depression, by helping someone see the depression as something external to themselves. Even choosing to get help is often ambivalent. Therapists may use therapies which identify “the depression” as something external to the patient. Theory of change–pre-contemplation, contemplation, change, backsliding are part of the process.

William James believed that experience formed the core of human existence. He was interested in building up a philosophy of the human mind which was based on experience. When he considered experience, however, he did not exempt anything. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James notes the real power and of conversion and mystical experiences. He discusses many kinds of conversion: conversion to religious belief; conversion away from religious belief to atheism; and conversion from drunkenness to sobriety are just a few. He notes that people can go to sleep one night believing one thing and wake up the next morning believing something different–even something, in the case of sobriety, which they may have been contemplating for some time. The founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were in fact inspired by The Varieties of Religious Experience to form Alcoholics Anonymous, which relies on the experience of conversion to bring people to sobriety.

The building up of experience in oneself, which finally results in a conversion, is another way of looking at the evolution of ideas. Just as James believed that consciousness, or mind, had evolved in humans as a trait selected for the survival of the species, he believed that ideas evolved in us as competing efforts until one idea was selected as the one upon which we would act. He went so far as to say that the action itself selected the idea; in other words, it is when we get out of bed that we have the idea, “I will get out of bed now,” rather than the idea, “I will stay under the covers where it is warm.”

The moment the alcoholic decides to stop drinking is the moment at which the idea to not drink truly emerges; every moment before when she has thought to herself, “I really need to stop drinking” while pouring another drink, the idea of not drinking was not yet fully present. It was one of several competing ideas, but the idea to drink was still winning. The idea to seek treatment for depression is also a thought that may have had to prepare itself before becoming real. Psychologists encourage patients to see the all the stages of change, including the contemplation that goes on before making the change, and the backsliding that can occur later, as being integral to the change itself. The end result did not emerge out of nowhere, but was built up as a result of our experience with the world. All the experience which went into the change was part of the change, and we could not necessarily have changed without it.

William James’ father was obsessed with the reality and presence of God. He belonged to the Swedenborgian movement, a religious gathering that sought to move away from the traditional forms of religion and get at the mystical truth. After his father died when James was in his late thirties, he wrote, “[Religion] is not the one thing needful, as [Father] said. But it is needful with the rest (Richardson 233).” To return to conversions, James noticed that people experienced real conversion both to and away from religious faith. He sought to explain this by naming that source of religious faith the “More.”

Most experiences, James believed, came to us through the world of our senses. But we could not discount the experiences of mystics and dreamers, even experiences stemming from intoxicants or what we might call mental illness. James was out to build up a philosophy based on human experience, and he was determined to include all human experience. He called this source of experience that seemed to be outside the sensory world the “More.” He was open to the possibility that it was divine, or that it was some untapped part of our own brains, some sense we had not yet learned to name. But James insisted that we could not ignore the More, which was the source of religion, art, mystical experiences and conversion.

James’ philosophy is one of my favorites because he makes room for everybody. He insists on no dogma, but only on the test of action that comes from sincere belief. It does not matter to me whether a person labels their belief Christian or Jewish, or theist or humanist, although all those words signify rich traditions worth celebrating. What matters to me is what you will do, as the poet says, with your one wild and precious life.

Sources

Many thanks to Carolyn Stevenson for her helpful insights into clinical depression.

Doherty, Alex and Clive Hamilton. “God, Sex and the Left (Part 1).” New Left Project. 9 Nov. 2011. Accessed 22 Dec. 2012.

Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

Tags: Different Beliefs, Theology
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Different Beliefs, Common Covenant: Sermon for December 11, 2011

January 11th, 2012

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

“Starr King Fellowship is a multigenerational, welcoming congregation where different beliefs come together in common covenant. We work together in our fellowship, our community, and our world to nurture justice, respect and love.”

That’s our Who We Are statement, drafted following mutual interviews done by dozens of attendees at worship services and adult education sessions two years ago. A small group of people went through piles of anonymous interview notes, collected the responses into thematic groups, and distilled our thoughts and hopes about what kind of community this is into those two sentences. We read them this morning as after we lit our chalice. They are printed every week on the back of your order of service and in our weekly and monthly newsletters.

All of the words in this statement are precious to me. I want us to live up to every one. But the part of it that resonates most for me right now is in the first sentence: “[We are] a welcoming congregation where different beliefs come together in common covenant.” There are fewer and fewer places in our society where different beliefs truly come together. The more Starr King Fellowship can be one of those places, the better we will fulfill our mission.

When the Unitarians were first finding their voice and defining themselves as a religious movement in the early 19th century, they paid a lot of attention to what beliefs would be acceptable within their group. We might not like to think that, because Unitarianism, and later Unitarian Universalism, have always been religions without a creed, where no one need sign or assent to a statement of belief in order to be a member. But the men who gathered to consider organizing the several Unitarian churches at the beginning of the 19th century were just as eager to protect their “brand” as any creedal faith.

They called themselves the “Anonymous Association” at first. When a discussion was held about whether to form a Unitarian Association, so that they could promulgate their views of religion and organize liberal Christian churches together, some were in favor. But some were opposed. One historian writes, “[This] opinion was expressed by George Bond, a leading merchant of Boston, who was afraid that Unitarianism would become popular, and that, when it had gamed a majority of the people of the country to its side, it would become as intolerant as the other sects (Cooke IV).” Bond and others saw the danger in creating a name which would bring only like-minded men and women to their side.

The early Unitarians knew that once they formed an Association, many different kinds of people ascribing to liberal religion would join them. When that person was Theodore Parker, before the civil war, who offended the sensibilities of many Boston Unitarians with his militant abolitionism, they didn’t exactly throw him out–although all the other Boston ministers stopped exchanging pulpits with him.

Now, in our modern society, we face a new threat to the diversity of ideas. It is very possible to navigate our social and electronic worlds and only encounter people like ourselves. I have shared some of this before in terms of class: one summer I went in close succession to a show at the Silver Center, where I saw dozens of people I knew, and to a race at the now-gone Dirt Track Speedway in Wentworth, where the only person I even recognized was a check-out clerk at Hannaford grocery store. There are worlds of class difference in our area, and those worlds do not have much cause to overlap. I find the overlap at (coincidentally) the grocery store, at the hospital, and on the Concord Trailways bus. But it’s possible to go through much of your life in our part of New Hampshire, which probably has more class diversity than some parts of the country, and only interact with people like yourself.

We can also spend time only with our political allies. One of my best friends in the Plymouth area is my across-the-street neighbor. She and I run together, our families celebrate birthdays together, my son goes to her house after school three days a week. She was an incredible support to me when I was at the end of my second pregnancy and at the bottom of my emotional reserves. I enjoy her company and her friendship.

The thing is, I’m not sure, if she hadn’t moved in across the street from me, that we would have become friends at all. My friend is politically very conservative and I am very liberal; she is religiously conservative and I am liberal; our views on topics falling within the political spectrum almost always diverge; our views on religion are brought together only in the broadest sense. But the happy coincidence of becoming neighbors has allowed us to become friends nevertheless. We both enjoy crafts, we both enjoy parenting (and struggle with its frustrations, as well), we both enjoy getting outside and playing board games. We have plenty in common to be friends, and we have that enjoyment of each other’s company that is included in any good friendship. If we had vetted each other first for how we would agree, we might not have found our friendship. As it is, we are able to be friends despite our differences, and we have broadened each other’s understanding of those areas where we disagree. I wouldn’t give up that kind of connection for anything.

In our digital age, it is easier and easier to only see the opinions and ideas of those we agree with. Many of us encounter digital media through Facebook, where we can see the articles and ideas of our friends. We can watch movies recommended by friends, read books recommended by friends, get our news from the same sources as all our friends. It is possible to interact with the outside world through the bubble of our insular communities, never really learning how the other half lives and thinks, whoever that other half may be.

It has always seemed to me, however, that there is something special about our little corner of the world here in central and northern New Hampshire. Perhaps it is the same sort of thing I have heard said about Alaska, that people may be bitter political enemies, but it is still a community’s responsibility to make sure everyone gets through the winter. Our congressional districts are big enough that it is not practical to move just to be in a district with like-minded people. We live together, in our economically diverse region, helping each other and practicing the arts of neighborliness even when we disagree.

This congregation was founded as a home for liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism in the Plymouth area. As we have grown, our reach has grown, and we now welcome individuals and families from all over central and northern New Hampshire. We are diverse in many ways. We are intentionally welcoming to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, having gone through the Welcoming Congregation process ten years ago. We have had some racial diversity, as permitted by the very racially homogenous nature of rural New Hampshire. I believe we have a great deal of class diversity, which we may not even see. One of my hopes for our fellowship is that we will become a spiritual home to people of all economic backgrounds and circumstances whose journey has brought them to our liberal congregation.

One way to express the mission and values of an organization is to contemplate what difference will have been made in the world–in one year, in five years, in one hundred years–because we have been here. Let’s go back to our statement about Who We Are to see if we can paint a picture of what kind of world we will help create. First, we say we are multigenerational. Every year, as we continue to welcome children into our community, and send them out into their futures, I see a world with young people full of the commitment to tolerance and justice which they have learned here. I see them as young adults, bringing their understanding of the value of reason and the truth of diversity into their friendships and their workplaces. I see families supported by the programs we offer for young children, for elders, and for parents. I see our community continuously strengthened, not only by the support we offer directly to those who come to our programs, or those whom we serve in the community, but by the inspiration people get in worship and in the life of the fellowship to be kind, respectful, justice-making people in all aspects of their lives.

We say we are welcoming. This morning we heard two readings about how people get together in a congregation. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, James Luther Adams extolled the value of the church social action committee, which brought people together around a shared passion for justice and fomented change in the community. In the early twenty-first century, Philip Clayton argues that the minister and lay leader must be hosts and hostesses in the congregation, inviting people into shared experience both in person and on-line. We have ever more ways of being in touch with each other since Adams’ time, but our connections have not deepened as they have proliferated. The values of Adams’ committees–that they bring people together, that they provide forums for exploring dominant and minority points of view, that they knit the fabric of community ever tighter–are still present in our congregation. We must become hosts to invite people into these sorts of relationships. By being welcoming, Starr King Fellowship will create inviting spaces in our building, in our community, and on-line, where people’s human and spiritual connections may be strengthened and deepened.

We are spiritually diverse. We are a place where “different beliefs come together in common covenant.” Now, in my mind, the way we know our beliefs is through our actions. Someone said to me recently that if we can all agree to act in concert, to worship in a certain way or combat poverty together, then our beliefs must not be that diverse. But different beliefs can lead to the same shared actions. I was in a meeting with other Unitarian Universalists recently in which one older gentleman spoke fervently about his support for his local Occupy movement. His congregation was considering whether to open their church kitchen to the protesters, who were camped very near the church. He was actively involved in helping to make that happen. Later in the meeting, someone complained about congressional districts being redrawn so that there was no one to vote for except the Republican. This gentleman responded, “What’s wrong with that?” It shows us that principled, good-hearted people can agree on action while disagreeing on philosophy, theology, or religious practices. Our covenant is our agreement of how to be together. Within that covenant, we should be as welcoming as possible to all people and all philosophies of life.

The last sentence of our statement about Who We Are says that we will “work together in our fellowship, our community and our world to nurture justice, respect and love.” This is the great purpose of our covenant. We will not be a chapel, here merely for the spiritual well-being of those within our own walls. We will help to create a fairer community and a better world because we are in it. In the new year, we will begin a project in partnership with the Whole Village Family Resource Center to educate ourselves, and others who will join us from other churches, to learn more about poverty, class difference, and our own location in the class structure of America.

From there, we will see what kind of outreach and support we can offer to poorer families in our neighborhood, or those families with whom Whole Village works. We will not engage as “do-gooders,” offering solutions to those who have none, but as partners, offering our resources and willingness to help to those who might benefit from them. Because we have been here, children have been served in after-school programs, civil marriage rights for all couples have been defended, and intercultural understanding was promoted after September 11th. Because we are here, in the future, we will continue to create a world where more people find justice, respect and love than if Starr King Unitarian Universalist Fellowship was not part of our community.

I want to share with you something I’ve shared with our new member classes this year. It is first that membership in the fellowship means finding that your own mission and the fellowship’s mission are in alignment, and that you can adopt the fellowship’s mission as part of your own. But it also means that we will all be like those 18 people who founded our fellowship in 1980. If we suddenly woke up one morning and this fellowship were no longer here, each one of us would be the stem cells in the body of this community who could recreate it. The fellowship is us, it resides in us, and our spirits will carry it forward into the future. Every one of you here today is a part of what makes our community special and spiritually powerful, and every one of you will help us step into the mystery of faith together.

Sources

Adams, James Luther. An Examined Faith: Social Context and Religious Commitment. Ed. George K. Beach. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Clayton, Philip. “Theology and the Church After Google.” The Princeton Theological Review. 43 (Fall 2010): 7-20.

Cooke, George Willis. Unitarianism in America: A History of Its Origin and Development. 10th ed. Project Gutenberg, 2005. iBiblio. Web. Accessed 10 Dec. 2011.

Tags: Common Covenant, Different Beliefs, Unitarian Universalism
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What Is Love?: Sermon for December 4, 2011

December 6th, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

“Love is patient; love is kind…[it] rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (1 Cor. 13: 4, 7-8).” These words were written by an early Christian minister to a very new church in the decades after Jesus’ death, in an effort to help them in their new life as a community together. They were written 2,000 years ago, but they have endured, and have become a part of the Christian scripture read at countless weddings. They were a comfort to the people who received that letter. They have spiritual weight and meaning even today, for they talk to us of the meaning of love.

Our reading this morning was from the book Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Maine. At the time she wrote the book, she was the chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, and her work with them, as well as her husband’s death, make up the subject matter of the book. As chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, she went with the Wardens on search and rescue missions in the woods, available to offer comfort both to the Wardens and to the families of those missing or found injured or dead. Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist. Most of the people she ministered to were Roman Catholic. She needed to find language that was true to her theology but would still offer comfort to those she served.

She was praying with one man whose sister, overwhelmed by a life of clinical depression made worse after the birth of her child, took her own life in the Maine woods. She assures the man that God will love and accept his sister into heaven no matter how she died, that God does not have the same prejudice against mental illness that befalls us humans. Then she holds the man’s hands in her own, and begins to pray the 23rd Psalm: “Love is my shepherd, I shall not want. Love makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside cool waters; Love restores my soul. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for Love is with me (113).”

Hear the difference?

How many of you grew up with a God who was punishing and angry? How many of you saw in God the worst of what you saw in your parents: frustration, anger, authority for authority’s sake? It wasn’t the God I knew as a child, but that was the God of plenty of my friends. God takes sides, there are rules, you’d better not break the rules or you’ll go to hell. A friend of mine from high school told me recently that she turned toward a more intentional relationship with Christ because as a teenager, the man who would become her husband broke down in tears, expressing his fear that she, as a once-born Christian, would go to hell. That’s a lot of fear and weight coming through an understanding of God. It’s a lot of anxiety that’s God’s rules are probably like our rules, only worse.

So for today, let’s set aside the word “God.” At other times, I’ve preached about how we religious liberals should reclaim that powerful word and help open up its meaning, help reclaim it from proponents of narrowness and hate. But today, let’s leave it be. What if we embrace the word “love”? Love is patient. It’s not in any hurry. It doesn’t demand that you change who you are or that you hurry on your spiritual journey. Love is always with you, waiting, helping. It is something you can settle into and rely on. Love is kind. It does not judge you, or criticize you. It meets you where you are.

I want to tell some stories about this kind of love between people. Not erotic love, which binds lovers together, and has its own wonders and meaning. But divine love–the kind of love the Greeks called agape–the kind of love the writer meant when he wrote, “Love rejoices in the truth.” There is a story from the Buddhist Lotus Sutra about this kind of love between a father and a son.

A young man left his father and ran away. For long he dwelt in other countries, for ten, or twenty, or fifty years. The older he grew, the more needy he became. Wandering in all directions to seek clothing and food, he unexpectedly approached his native country. The father had searched for his son all those years in vain and meanwhile had settled in a certain city. His home became very rich; his goods and treasures were fabulous.

At this time, the poor son, wandering through village after village and passing through countries and cities, at last reached the city where his father had settled. His father had longed to see him, but did not know where to look for him. The father had accumulated much wealth over his long life, but sorrowed that he had no one to share it with, for his son was his only child. He was overjoyed when he saw his son, from afar, back in the city of his birth.

His father, beholding the son, was struck with compassion for him. One day he saw at a distance, through the window, his son’s figure, haggard and drawn, lean and sorrowful, filthy with dirt and dust. He took off his strings of jewels, his soft attire, and put on a coarse, torn and dirty garment, smeared his body with dust, took a basket in his right hand. By such means he got near to his son, to whom he afterwards said, “Ay, my man, you stay and work here, do not leave again. I will increase your wages, give whatever you need, bowls, rice, wheat-flour, salt, vinegar, and so on. Have no hesitation; besides there is an old servant whom you can get if you need him. I am old and advanced in years, but you are young and vigorous; all the time you have been working, you have never been deceitful, lazy, angry or grumbling.”

Then the father became ill and, knowing that he would die soon. Seeing that his own end was approaching, he commanded his son to come, and gathered all his relatives, the kings, priests, warriors, and citizens. When they were all assembled, he addressed them saying, “Now, gentlemen, this is my son, begotten by me. It is over fifty years since he left me and ran away to endure loneliness and misery. At that time I sought him sorrowfully. Suddenly I met him in this place and regained him. This is really my son and I am really his father. Now all the wealth which I possess belongs entirely to my son, and all my previous disbursements and receipts are known by this son.” When the poor son heard these words of his father, great was his joy (quoted in Valea).

In this story, the father, knowing that the son will not return to him as he is, puts on the clothes and manner of a laborer and joins his son in the trash heap. He is willing to give up all the benefits of the wealth he has accumulated and go do one of the worst jobs alongside his son, in order to be with him, in order to spend time with him, in order to rebuild trust and loving friendship between them. A central image in Buddhism is the love a mother bears for her child, even to the point of laying down her own life for her child, and invites each of us to love our fellow beings in this way. Here we have a father who will put aside all his worldly possessions and accomplishments in order to be with his son. There have been moments when we knew this kind of love. We have felt it for our children. There were moments when those who cared for us knew this kind of love for us. It is the best of what we can imagine between human beings.

“Love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” The spiritual story that comes to my mind when I think of this love which is hopeful, faithful and enduring is the Jewish story of Ruth and Naomi.

Ruth and Orpah were two women married to two men who were brothers, and the men’s mother was Naomi. Now both men took ill and died, and Naomi saw that the right thing for her to do was to make sure that her daughters-in-law, both childless, got back to their own people safely. She journeyed with them as far as Orpah’s home, and there they all said their goodbyes to her, and cried and hugged, and sent Orpah back to her family.

But when it came time to continue the journey, Ruth turned to Naomi and said, “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die–there will I be buried. May even death not part me from you (Ruth 1:16-17)!”

Ruth and Naomi did return to Naomi’s people in Judah, and continued their life as a family together. Ruth remarried, and Naomi remained with her. Their love for each other carried them through poverty and homelessness. Their love endured at a time when two women alone would have had no standing in society whatsoever. Their love hoped for a better future, believed in the power of partnership over the power of tradition, and endured many trials.

These human stories, told through human imaginations and human longing for wholeness, describe our greatest hope for our lives together. So if these are the best hopes and longings we have of human beings, they can also be the best hopes we have for that which is highest, that which grounds us, and that which is created among us when we gather together. We all have our different names for that which is highest and that which is grounding. But surely one name can be “Love.” The love of individual humans can fail us. But our imagining of the possibilities of love, our vision of the best of love, this can sustain us and carry us through.

In our reading this morning, the Unitarian Universalist teenager pointed out that if our religious traditions teach love, then love trumps all. Love is greater than heaven and hell, and it’s greater than the differences in faith which keep us apart. It’s greater than the time and distance and hurt between an estranged father and son, and it’s greater than the threat of poverty and homelessness in our society. We know that we humans can’t always live up to this kind of love, but we can imagine it, and it we can imagine it, we can believe in it and strive toward it. Love is patient. It will wait for us. Love is kind. It is with us. Love rejoices in the truth. It is with us as we seek after righteousness. Love bears all things. We bear our burdens more lightly. Love believes all things. Differences in belief will not keep us apart. Love hopes all things. We can see a better tomorrow. Love endures all things. We are not alone in the hard times. Love never ends. Love is with us always.

Please join me in prayer.

In this moment of quiet, we turn our hearts and our beings toward the source of Love in the universe. Let us be still and feel all the love we have been given and are given today. Let us feel the love from our family, from our friends, from the kindness of strangers, and from all who make compassion their lives’ work. Let this love become part of our breath and part of our beings.

In this moment of quiet, help us feel the love in our own hearts. Let us feel love for those we like and those we have disagreed with. Help our compassion expand toward all living creatures, opening up to experience their sacred nature. Help us see where in our lives there is fertile soil for the seeds of love to grow and bloom.

Our hearts and minds turn to that Love which is greater than our own selves, which is the sum of compassion in the universe. Help us imagine a Love which is as great, as wide, and as strong as our world needs it to be. Amen.

Sources

All Biblical quotations (unless otherwise noted) are from the New Revised Standard Version.

Braestrup, Kate. Here If You Need Me: A True Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 2007.

Valea, Ernest. “The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Christianity and Buddhism.” A Comparative Analysis of the Major World Religions from a Christian Perspective. Ed. Ernest Valea. Accessed 2 Dec. 2011. http://www.comparativereligion.com/prodigal.html.

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The Five Points of the New Theology: Sermon for November 9, 2011

November 22nd, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

Nineteenth century Universalism and Unitarianism were home, for a while, to a minister with the wonderful name of Orestes Brownson. When Orestes was twenty-one years old and teaching school in Stillwater, New York, he left the strict Calvinist Presbyterian church of his childhood and converted to Universalism. Two years later he was ordained as a Universalist minister in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and became a circuit riding preacher, periodical editor and political organizer in the northeast. Despite his conversion, Brownson continued to explore and wonder about religious truth. In 1830, having read the sermon “Likeness to God” by the founder of Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, Brownson converted to Unitarianism. He continued his work for social change, especially working with the Workingman’s Party for justice for the working classes. He was caught up in the Transcendentalist movement which was a main thrust of Boston Unitarianism at the time. Brownson founded the Society for Christian Union and Progress in Boston in 1836, hoping that it would be a vehicle to “bring progressive religion to the working class (Robinson 224).”

Brownson served the Society and Unitarianism until 1844, when he entered another period of spiritual crisis. He could not understand how the conservative Whig party won the presidential election in 1840. Brownson needed his spirituality, and his beliefs, to serve the working class. He could see that his country, caught in a terrible economic depression, was doing nothing for working people. In 1844, Brownson converted to Catholicism. He remained an active political writer and organizer, and lived out his life as a Catholic layman.

For some of us, religion is something we got when we were children, by virtue of the practices in the family and the home we grew up in. We inhaled our religion as we inhaled our family’s culture. It became part of us, part of our essence as a person. We could no more be something other than Unitarian, Universalist, or Unitarian Universalist than we could have a different ethnic identity or love different comfort foods.

But for others of us, religion and faith are a journey we have been on for our entire lives. We started out somewhere, and we have journeyed to get where we are now. We may have journeyed from a strictly religious Christian home, and now find ourselves in a mystical, wondering place. Or we may have been on a journey from no religious identity at all, to finding our search for human meaning within this fellowship community. Religion is often discussed in the public sphere as if it is a final answer. Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism all make truth-claims about God and the proper way to worship that hedge out the others. We are right, each camp says; all other ways are wrong! You would think that if there were a supernatural force communicating to us the correct way to be in relationship with that which is beyond ourselves, that it would be able to get the message right the first time. You would think we would not have such diversity.

But if we look at religion not as something handed to us from on high, but as our attempts to understand those moments when human understanding transcends our everyday experiences, than it is only surprising that there are not more examples of religion than we already know. And, given what we know of human nature, it’s not surprising that when a group of people comes to share a new understanding of the nature of the divine, they tend to think that they have arrived at the one and only true answer. Moses meets the great I AM on top of Mt. Sinai; Jesus speaks in parables and acts through healing in Galilee; Mohammed receives a new revelation from the angel; Joseph Smith finds sacred tablets in his back yard. The communities that each of these men spoke to came to believe, over time, that their leaders had finally led them to The Truth.

Of course, spiritual truth does not stand still. Other people have mystical experiences, other leaders come forward with charisma and a path for their people. Both Islam and the Church of Latter Day Saints have become major religious forces in the world since the advent of Christianity. Faithful Christians might wish that their revelation was the last word on the subject of religion, but clearly it is not. And Islam and Mormonism will not remain, either. Revelation continues to capture the imaginations and devotions of human communities.

Unitarian Universalism comes out of the Protestant tradition, which places a high value on the individual’s experience of the divine. In mainline Protestant churches, it is expected that this experience will be informed by, and be in line with, Christian scripture and Christian tradition. In Unitarian Universalism, for a long while, it has been understood that understanding of the Spirit of Life and Love may take many forms. The first person to claim the name “Unitarian” for the new liberal movement in Congregational churches in the early 19th century, William Ellery Channing, was definitely Christian. But by the time of the Transcendental movement, Unitarian ministers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were reading not only Christian and Jewish scripture, but also Hindu and Islamic holy books. They were exploring meaning found in the human spirit, and in the natural world.

We can see the crucial difference between traditional Protestantism and Unitarianism by comparing the five pillars of Calvinism to the “five points of the new theology.” John Calvin was a Reformation leader in 16th century Switzerland. He promoted a strict theology of preordained salvation and damnation. The five points of his theology are: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

Total depravity means that Calvin and his followers believe that human beings are born into and live in a world of sin, utterly disconnected from God’s world of grace. Unconditional election and limited atonement are connected. Calvin believed that God decided at the beginning of time who among humans would be saved and who would be damned. Only a limited number would be saved, and nothing humans did could change who those people were. So some people will be “elected” to be saved regardless of what they do, and the rest of us only participate partially in Christ’s atonement of humankind. The knowledge of being saved comes upon people, and (Calvinists believe) transforms them utterly, so that even if they lived a sinful life before, they become holy afterward. Finally, the perseverance of the saints means that whoever is so called by saving grace shall remain one of the elect forever.

This theology was predominant in New England congregational churches in the 17th and 18th centuries. But by the beginning of the 19th century, some of the faithful began to have other ideas. The Universalists founded their churches in protest to the beliefs that people were utterly sinful and that some would go to heaven some to hell. They believed that everyone would go to heaven. Unitarians believed, too, that people were a mix of good and bad impulses, rather than being basically evil. They also believed that people had to use their reason and understanding to know what was good in the world. In 1886, when the American Unitarian Association had been in existence for about sixty years, James Freeman Clarke published his own answers to Calvin’s five pillars of theology. He called them the “Five Points of the New Theology,” and if you grew up in a Unitarian church, you may have learned them in Sunday school. They were: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the progress of humankind onward and upward forever (Robinson 235).

The fatherhood of God means that God relates to humans with both the love and chastisement of a parent. The brotherhood of Man means we’re all in this together. The leadership of Jesus builds on earlier Unitarian theology, affirming that Jesus’ value to humans comes through his teachings and example, not anything mystical that happened when he died. Salvation by character is the exact opposite of unconditional election. It means human beings become better in their spirits by becoming better people. Finally, the progress of humankind onward and upward forever meant that we could see the results of Jesus’ leadership and the improvement of our characters in human history. The basic categories are the same as in Calvinism. There are people, there is God, and Jesus, and we acknowledge that things on earth aren’t as great as they could be, and that humans turn to religious understanding to try to make things better.

The categories continued to change. By the time of the merger of the Unitarian and the Universalist churches in 1961, it was accepted that different people experienced the divine differently. Today, the “Who We Are” statement of this congregation says we are a community where “different beliefs come together in common covenant.” To me, this means that although we may believe different things, we all claim this shared community as our own. “We need not think alike to love alike.” We no longer all agree on God, or Jesus, or the need for salvation, or eternal progress. Our progress continues. We can’t, after the terrible wars of the twentieth century, think that humankind progresses onward and upward forever, even if we can see the huge strides forward we have taken. Our understanding of the sacred changes as human existence continues.

When I was in search for my first ministry position, the year before Starr King Fellowship called me as a minister, I had a telephone interview with a Christian Unitarian Universalist church. I was interested in the work because my family lives in that region of the country, and I thought I could serve a Christian congregation that was also Unitarian Universalist. They asked me about my theology. They said, “In your description of yourself, you say you currently identify as a Christian Unitarian Universalist. What does that mean? Why do you say ‘currently’?”

I told them: yes, my spirituality had brought me to a realization that I was going to find meaning and wrestle with questions of life in reference to the teachings of Jesus. But I said “currently,” I told them, because if it had been a journey to bring me where I was then, I had to be open to the possibility that the journey would continue. Just because I had come to the place where they were, did not mean I would stay there theologically. Just because they were one kind of Christian Unitarian Universalist church right then, did not mean they would always be that kind of a church. Change is always happening. It was not the right answer. I did not get another interview.

In the story we heard this morning, the young monk knows the teachings of his community inside and out. He knows that it is paramount to follow the rules. The older monk, on the other hand, has come to know that the ethic of compassion is more important than the letter of the law. Even within the same spiritual community, he has grown and changed and moved in his thinking. Spirituality is like an ocean we swim in without knowing it. It is all around us, waiting to show us moments of beauty, of right, of horror, of a world waiting to be made better. Our experiences shape us. Unexpected moments of grace touch our hearts. We are called to be open to change with a spirit of humility. We are called to stand by our beliefs with a spirit of strength. Balancing the two, we are called to be open to the beliefs of others, even when we disagree. We must always be ready to be touched by the wonder in the world, to have it break through our habits and expectations and truly amaze us.

Please join me in a time of reflection.

Here, in this space, I invite you to find your center and your inner spirit. Become aware of yourself, from the crown of your head to your feet on the floor. Feel your breath enter your body, enliven you, and flow out again. Become yourself, in this place, at this time.

Now let us reach out our spirits to all the human spirits around us. We connect to the spirits in this room, to all the people in this sanctuary, who sit and share a time of peace with us. We reach further, and connect to all the people in this fellowship community who cannot be with us this morning; and further still, to all in our communities of love and friendship. We reach out further yet, to all those in our communities whom we do not know, to the people of our country, to the people of our world, to living beings across the earth.

We ask one another for acceptance and grace. We ask for the room to change and grow, and for the stability to remain the same. We promise to hold our love wide to all who will enter into community with us. Our thoughts may differ, but our hearts are alike.

Amen.

Sources

Clarke, James Freeman. “The Five Points of Calvinism and the Five Points of the New Theology.” Ed. Mercy Aiken. Tentmaker Ministries. Accessed 15 Oct. 2011.

Conover, Sarah, ed. Kindness: A Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2010.

Dabney, R. L. “The Five Points of Calvinism.” Ed. Phillip R. Johnson. The Hall of Church History. Ed. Phillip R. Johnson. 1-5. Accessed 7 Nov. 2011.

Robinson, David. The Unitarians and the Universalists. Denominations in America. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Tags: Christianity, Unitarianism, Universalism
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Suffering and Compassion: Sermon for November 6, 2011

November 8th, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

You know the story of Siddhartha Gautama. How, when he was born, a wise man gave his father a prophecy that little Siddhartha would become either a great king or a great holy man. His father, knowing where the money was in that choice, determined that his son would never know suffering or want, never experience human hardship, never have any cause to turn to the ascetic life of a holy man. Siddhartha grew to adulthood without any wants in the world. He took a wife and started a family. One day, wanting to know what the world was like beyond the palace walls, Siddhartha asked his driver to take him out among the people. On that drive, for the first time in his life, Siddhartha Gautama saw an aged man, bent over with his years. “What is this?” Siddhartha asked Channa, his charioteer. “This is old age,” Channa replied.

Siddhartha realized he needed to know more. With Channa as his guide, he took more and more trips beyond the palace gates. He saw a person whose body was ravaged with disease. He saw a person’s corpse, decaying and open to the elements. He saw the thinnest man he had ever seen, and learned from Channa that this man was an ascetic, who had given up the pleasures of the world in order to become closer to the Essence of Life. Realizing that he would never attain enlightenment by living a privileged and protected life within the palace, Siddhartha left his wife and family, his father and his hopes and dreams, and went into the world to become an ascetic himself.

Siddhartha Gautama, the man who was to become the Buddha, realized that he could not attain enlightenment or true happiness without understanding suffering. He had been given a life without want: a life of wealth, and love, and power; but he knew that the contentment he might have felt in that life was not the same as true spiritual enlightenment. For that, his journey had to take him into the human world of decline, disease and death; in other words, into the world of suffering.

We think of suffering as a bad thing. We try to avoid it when we can. But the word “to suffer” doesn’t exactly mean “to have bad things happen.” It means “to undergo.” We “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” whether that fortune be good or bad. We “suffer the little children,” at least before bedtime. From a certain point of view, simply being alive is an act of suffering, of allowing things to happen to us at a minimum, or of actively seeking out engagement with the world. The less fear we have of life, the more of life can happen to us and with us. And the more we engage with our own spirits and the world around us, the more we take the risk that the “suffering” we undergo will sometimes be “suffering” terrible things.

When I think about the sorrows and losses I have suffered in my life, one of my first thoughts is that I ought to be grateful that my life has been so blessed. And I am, because it has. I’m aware that the struggles and losses I have had are much less than some people face. My husband and I lost a pregnancy before I became pregnant with our oldest son, and nothing in my life had prepared me for the utter loss I felt during that time. More recently, I have realized how a career in ministry will mean an accumulation of losses, as people who I come to know and love in ministry will fall ill, or age, and ultimately die. I say “in ministry,” but I could say “in life.” The fact that some people face more loss or face it sooner does not mean my own losses and suffering do not have meaning for my life.

Last year, when members of our fellowship were facing long illnesses which were likely to (and did) end in their deaths, I imagined myself skimming over the surface of my sadness. I thought I had a role to occupy in the fellowship, a role which would be hindered if I allowed myself to become too sad or too moved by these women and the illnesses they faced. But finally I realized I would never be able to minister to them and their families if I maintained that attitude. The way for me to make meaning out of my suffering has been to go deeper into it, to enter the sadness like a room with shuttered windows, to allow myself to feel the pain for as long as it takes and then to become a new person again on the other side. Through experiencing this sadness and suffering I connect more genuinely to those around me, for we are united in our suffering as in nothing else.

I say “make meaning out of suffering,” and this is a tricky thing. Because while we have the capacity, as human beings, to make meaning out of our suffering–out of all the things we undergo, whether great or small–that is not the same thing as saying we are suffering for a reason. There is no reason for the suffering of humanity. Disaster is not visited upon us on purpose. It is not a message from on high; we are not “given what we can handle”; there is no cosmic plan. All of us suffer in our lives. If meaning is to come out of that suffering, it is meaning we, working within our communities create. We are free to fight against suffering, to try to avoid it in the future, and (especially) to try to create a world where fewer people suffer unnecessarily. This is also part of our task as meaning-makers. We can’t abdicate that task to a divine agent any more than we can avoid suffering altogether.

However, to say that our troubles are not visited upon us on purpose, and to affirm that we have done nothing to deserve our losses, or our illnesses, is not to say that there is no reason for why some suffer more than others in life. Very human differences and inequalities lead to differences in the difficulties of our lives. I am hesitant to bring illness into this, because I feel we in modern society have an illusion that a perfect life can yield a life free from illness, which is an illusion. But many suffer because of the station of life they are born to. Recent research has shown that intelligence quotient differences in children worldwide can often be attributed to childhood infectious disease (Sample). If an infant has to spend precious resources fighting off illness, her brain does not have the same capacity for growth and expansion as if she had been healthy. Poverty, illness, and war all visit suffering upon people unfairly, targeting some individuals and communities much more than others. These inequities are owing to humans, and it is our calling in life to make the world more fair and equal. Suffering is inevitable, but suffering is not fair. There is so much more hardship in the world than there needs to be.

For a long time, Siddhartha Gautama pursued the life of an ascetic. He ate very little, and wandered India, begging for his bread. He was a wise man, and gathered a group of seekers around him. Together they vowed to take less and less sustenance from the world, striving to end their dependence on a cycle of want, deprivation and satiation. But Siddhartha could not resist when a woman approached him with a bowl of milk, desiring to share it with him. Disgusted with his weakness, his friends left him. Siddhartha began to wonder if the path of the ascetic would lead to enlightenment after all.

Sitting under a lotus tree, Siddhartha almost dozed off in the warmth of a summer afternoon. His mind drifted back to when he had been a boy, sitting in the grass as the workers cut the grain in his father’s fields. He remembered the sound of the men calling to each other, and the buzz of the insects amidst the flowers. His mind detached from wanting and striving; and Siddhartha realized that recapturing this childhood moment, this detachment from the cycle of desire and loss, was the path to enlightenment. It was no more about starving the body than it was about stuffing the body; no more about seeking suffering than about avoiding it.

Unitarian Universalist theology has taken this discovery to heart. A few years ago, two theologians who are also women, one a Unitarian Universalist and one a Christian, wrote the book Proverbs of Ashes about the dangers of thinking we need to suffer in order to be spiritually whole. They especially took aim at what is called “atonement theology” in Christianity, which is the belief that people must suffer as Christ suffered on the cross in order to be in right relationship with God. The authors, Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima-Brock, pointed out how a theology of suffering asked people who were being abused by other people to accept their abused in the name of religion. They also pointed out that such a theology turned God into an abusive parent. They held up healthier models of relating to God within Christianity, models that affirmed human life and well-being, models that celebrated God’s love. Suffering is not a path to enlightenment.

But we must also remember where Siddhartha started, because avoidance of suffering is not a path to enlightenment either. It is not hard to see that poor people suffer more than the rich in our society. Both can lose loved ones too soon, both can fall ill, but the rich have many more resources at their disposal to avoid suffering and to cope with it. But their efforts may still be futile. The social scientist Richard Wilkinson has found that the healthiest human societies are those where the gap between the rich and the poor is small, and where cohesiveness and social capital are thick. We all prosper when we have a sense of “being in it together.” Our health and longevity comes not from the objects we acquire, or even the services to which we have access, but from our connection to our neighbor. In the United States today, where the gap between the rich and the poor is so great and so stark, we are all opening ourselves up to greater suffering. Neither Siddhartha the pampered prince nor Siddhartha the ascetic found enlightenment. Once Siddhartha embarked upon the middle way, seeking connection to his fellow beings, he became the Buddha.

So how do you make meaning out of your life? How do you understand the losses and struggles you have suffered through? I liked the invitation in our reading this morning, by the late Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church. Church invites us to consider what we would put in a time capsule for the children we love today to open in 100 years. What of our lives would we bequeath to them? We could give them money, or the shares of stock, or the secret to financial success, if we have it. But would that really be the best of us? What if we could give them the sense of being loved? What if we gave them the compassion we have learned to have for ourselves and others? We could give them a memory of time shared with people we love. We could give them their own memories of our embrace. We could bequeath to them the meaning we have learned to make in our own lives, in the hopes that it will help them and their grandchildren make meaning of their own. These are the things that sustain us in this life and which will carry us forward into the deep. Our children, and our children’s children, will no more be able to avoid suffering than we have. Our greatest gift to them can be the love we have known which carried us through, in the hopes that their own hearts will open wider than ours ever could.

Sources

Church, Forrest. Lifecraft: The Art of Meaning in the Everyday. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Nakashima-Brock, Rita and Rebecca Parker. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.

Sample, Ian. “Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries, scientists claim.” The Guardian. 29 June 2010, online ed., main sec.: 13. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jun/30/disease-rife-countries-low-iqs.

Wilkinson, Richard G. Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Tags: Buddhism, Economic justice, Money and Spirituality, Spiritual growth
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Goddesses, Past and Present: Sermon for October 30, 2011

November 3rd, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

One of the great gifts Unitarian Universalism has given me was an entry into goddess spirituality when I was a teenager. The minister who had served my church since my family and I started attending when I was eleven was leaving. He needed help packing his books up before his move, and my parents nominated me to help him.

I remember standing in his sunny study at church, putting books in boxes, when Michael handed me a few thin volumes of poetry and said, “Here. I think you might like these.” While I had never been unhappy with my liberal Christian upbringing, since becoming a Unitarian Universalist, I had become aware that there were teachings in traditional Christianity which could not be true, and which were harmful to people of other faiths. These poems, written by women about their experience with a divine which was fully female, were the opening of a wide door into other ways of encountering holy wonder in the world.

I explored this way of being through poetry and ritual. My mother and I went to women’s singing events and spinning lessons, which seemed connected to the feminine divine, somehow. She took the class on goddess spirituality taught at our church, Cakes for the Queen of Heaven, although I either was not old enough or too busy with school to attend. It was a wonderful spiritual place to spend some years, but ultimately my own journey took me elsewhere. By the time I left for college, I did not know what I believed. By the time I finished divinity school, I had re-engaged with my Christian heritage, locating my struggle to name and relate to the divine within those terms and that story.

One thing that stuck with me from goddess spirituality was a fierce commitment to women’s spirituality and women’s involvement in the divine. Some of this came from our church. After Michael’s ministry, the church hired a woman as an interim minister and then called a woman to be the settled minister. These women helped launch me toward the ministry. Some of my nascent feminism came from my mother: from going to League of Women Voters events with her when I was small; from seeing her go back to work when my brother was a toddler; and from seeing her move her career forward in the male-dominated banking industry. By the time I entered the ministry, women were fast becoming the majority of Unitarian Universalist ministers. My foremothers helped shape my sense of women’s place as leaders in the spiritual community.

The spiritual community includes women and men. It includes people whose journey has taken them from one gender identity to the other, and people who find themselves most at home in the spaces between gender. Therefore, because our gathered human community contains such rich diversity, we must be capable of imagining symbols of the holy which contain this diversity, too.

One of those things about traditional Christianity which always bothered me was the notion that a God, who must be vast beyond our comprehension if not outright infinite, would limit God’s revelation of truth to a single human being who lived in Israel, spoke Aramaic and read Hebrew in the first decades of the Common Era. Surely it makes more sense to consider these limitations to be limitations of our own understanding or imagination, and not limitations of the Ultimate Reality. Our commitment to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning as Unitarian Universalists pushes us to look beyond inherited understanding to make our own meaning in the world.

That same imperative, to always test the limits of what we understand to be true, has caused me to look with interest recently at research which challenges some treasured aspects of goddess worship today. People throughout history and across cultures have worshipped the divine in its feminine form. But beginning in the mid-twentieth century, women’s communities began to focus on archaeological research which seemed to show evidence of widespread prehistorical goddess-worship. This wasn’t believed to be worship of a goddess within a pantheon, but rather worship of a single mother goddess as the primary understanding of the divine. One archaeologist in particular, Marija Gimbutas, applied her encyclopedic knowledge of Indo-European languages and archaeology to explore evidence of Neolithic goddess-worship at sites across Europe.

Gimbutas imagined a source of Indo-European culture, perhaps located in Turkey, which was peaceful and goddess-worshipping until a period, about 3,000 years ago, when this matriarchy was disrupted by invaders from the north (Eller 37-40, 46). This matriarchy is imagined to have been many things our current, patriarchal culture is not: peaceful, women-led, in harmony with nature and its cycles, and much less hierarchical. With the patriarchal invasion (or revolution–some theorists imagine patriarchy came from within these communities) came men’s dominance over women, humanity’s dominance over nature, and the dominance of the sword over the ways of peace. The power of claiming ancient goddesses lies in this loss. Modern women are aware that while they have achieved more success in the secular world, it has often come at the price of what they perceive as their essential “femaleness.” Women are looking for some hope that there was a time when things were different.

This is the hope we heard in our reading this morning, written by a woman and a goddess worshipper about the rituals for this time of year. She claims the power women need to let go of damaging relationships, let go of an understanding of themselves as weaker or unworthy, and connects these strong, feminist claims to the rituals of letting go which accompany Samhain. In her spirituality, based in the past she claims of ancient goddesses, she finds strength to let go of the damaging aspects of patriarchy and claim her own feminine power.

The only problem posed by claiming this powerful, matriarchal prehistory, when a single mother goddess was worshiped and life was peaceful, is that further archaeological and anthropological research does not support it. In the cultures we know of now which live as hunter-gatherers, men are dominant. When other archaeologists (women and men alike) have examined drawings and sculptures of women from Stone Age European sites, they have either not seen representations of women, or they have seen representations of women which may or may not be goddesses. From the moment the historical record begins, we have evidence of cultures across Europe which were much more male-dominated than our American culture is today.

One example of the disagreement in the field of archaeology is how to interpret the meaning of frescos found in Knossos, Crete, which were part of the Minoan culture, which flourished from the 27th century to the 15th century BCE. One fresco, called the “grandstand” fresco and dated at around 1600 BCE, shoes several women relaxing, draping their arms over one another’s waists, and seemingly enjoying conversation with each other. Other frescoes from the same period show men and women interacting companionably together, or competing in sports and hunting (Eller 152). Those who favor an interpretation supporting a feminist matriarchy read these frescoes as evidence that women and men were equals, and that women participated in all aspects of life which were later reserved for men: sport, hunting, and ample time for relaxation.

Other archaeologists point out that we do not have enough information to draw these conclusions. One classicist points out, “If the[se frescoes] were our only evidence for the position of Minoan women, we could give no answer. The subject is similar to that of the Parthenon frieze where Athenian maidens play a conspicuous role, and fifth century Athens was definitely not a matriarchal society (153).” In fifth century Athens, women were either the property of their father or their husband; women were cloistered inside their homes; infant girls were often left outside to perish; and teenage boys were the preferred sex-partners of upper-class men. Despite the prominent representation of women in its art, it is possible for a society to treat its women very poorly.

Recent archaeology does not say that it is impossible there was a feminist matriarchy in prehistorical Europe and Asia Minor. It only says that the evidence can be read in a number of ways, and that there is no strong evidence for a matriarchal prehistory. There is plenty of evidence for goddess worship, both prehistorically, historically, and today. But these goddesses were usually part of a pantheon, and goddesses were often seen as the special protectors of women–not primary, mother goddesses worshiped by men and women alike. There is no clear evidence that goddess worship, either in the past or today, is related to improved status for women in the society which worships them.

Scholars think, for instance, that the Demeter and Persephone story we heard this morning mirrored the experience of mothers and daughters in ancient Greece, where teenaged daughters were forcibly married to much older men–but were able to reunite with their mothers for long visits once they were wed. Demeter was not a powerful, protective mother goddess to ancient Greek women, who were used as property by their husbands and fathers; but she did provide comfort and a way for women to understand their plight.

I looked through the curriculum Cakes for the Queen of Heaven while preparing this sermon, a class published by the Unitarian Universalist Association and which many of you may have taken. It was popular in the late 1980s, and was followed several years later by the class Rise Up and Call Her Name. Both of these curricula seek to connect women to images and understandings of ancient, powerful goddesses. These goddesses are linked to a mythical time of matriarchy and peace. Images of female statues, identified as goddesses, are round of belly, breast and hip. These images help counter the contemporary image of female attractiveness as impossibly slender and frail. The feeling of the curriculum is one of women reclaiming power they know they have always had, but which society has rarely recognized.

Here is the impetus behind the hope and dream of a prehistorical feminist matriarchy. While women have achieved more fairness in American society, there is still a long way to go. Women see what a male-dominated society has wrought–war, inequality, injustice–and they imagine that, if they had more power, things would be different. We women want to be able to reach back into our history to find an example of when things were different and better, when women had the power we wish we had now.

However, when we imagine that past, we often imagine right along with it very traditional roles for women. In that matriarchal prehistory, we often imagine that women were revered and personally fulfilled as mothers and that technological advancement was limited. Many women now, women who also hunger for more righteousness and justice, find their sense of being in their work, and not in their children; they may choose not to have children, a choice only available very recently; they may want to make their way in male-dominated fields which are all about the advancement of technology. Feminism today and a matriarchal prehistory do not necessarily match up well.

But what of goddesses? Even if there was no feminist matriarchal prehistory, even if there was no widespread worship of a mother-goddess, seeing the divine as feminine today has powerful implications for women and men alike. The divine, whatever that may be–or the totality of human possibility, whatever that might look like–these are not limited by the imagination of any one group of humans.

The Source of Life is limited only by the possibility of human imagination, which adorns it and gives it form. If we imagine the Source of Life and Love as male, then we are more likely to imagine religious leaders as male, and more likely to give more worth to male humanity. If, on the other hand, we imagine the Source as female, or as possessing both genders, or a spectrum of gender identities, then we can lend more human possibility to what we imagine as infinite. Specifically imagining the divine as female gives so much power to women of faith who have felt for so long that they had none. It allows us to imagine ourselves as ministers, as rabbis, as congregational presidents, as theologians, as women who can shape the future of their faith. Our imaginations and our worship are not bounded by the past. Our understandings of the divine can flourish in the freedom of the future.

Please join me in prayer.

We give thanks for our foremothers who have shown us strength and love. We ask that their power may be with us today. We reach out this morning to those women who have gone before us, who helped us along our way and whose example we follow. If you treasure the name of a woman in your heart–a mother, a relative, a teacher, an example–a woman who helped you understand what it was to be good in the world, I invite you to say her name now.

Infinite Source of Peace and Love, we give thanks for all these women and all they have taught us. Be with us, women and men alike, as we move toward a world of more equality and justice, where Your ways may become our ways. Amen.

Sources

Eller, Cynthia. The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Ranck, Shirley Ann. Cakes for the Queen of Heaven: A Ten-Session Adult Seminar in Feminist Thealogy. Boston: Unitarian Universalist Assn., 1986.

Tags: Paganism, Women and spirituality
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Is There Room at the Table for the People Who Grow Our Food?: Sermon for October 16, 2011

October 26th, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

If I can start with a little plug for the Fundraising Committee, which has just been doing an excellent job for our fellowship, one of the things you will be able to bid on in our spring service auction will be a sermon topic of your choice. I offer this item every year. Last spring, Joe Kelaghan won the sermon topic. He knew right away what he wanted me to preach on. Joe is a man who puts his values into action.

Joe asked me to preach a sermon which the Rev. Rob Hardies, minister of All Souls UU Church in Washington, had suggested but never had the chance to preach, and it had the same title as this sermon: Is There Room at the Table for the People Who Grow Our Food? Joe takes ethical eating seriously as a vegan, and he is also concerned with the human workers who grow, harvest and process the food we eat.

He tells a story about being in Traverse City, Michigan with his spouse Thad at a family wedding in a vineyard. It was late in the season; the grapes had all been harvested from the vines. No workers were in sight. But for all the homage paid to the beauty of nature and the setting, and all the enjoyment of the food afterward, no mention was made of the human laborers who must have harvested the grapes for the wine and all the food the party enjoyed that day.

The workers who grow and harvest our food are largely invisible. Up here in rural New Hampshire, we are fortunate to have easy access to family farms where we can (if we are willing to pay a premium) buy food grown and harvested by our neighbors. However, even if we choose that option (and we recognize that not everyone can pay the higher prices), we can’t eat New Hampshire-grown vegetables year round. At some point all of us participate in an unfair labor market for getting the food we eat.

How unfair? Take the example of tomatoes. Most of the tomatoes eaten in America are grown in south Florida, on the border of the Everglades, in a climate and location completely unsuited to the growing of tomatoes. The environmental and food safety travesties aren’t our focus here, though, so let’s just consider the workers. Tomatoes, unlike many crops, must be picked by hand. In the name of keeping tomato costs low, some growers have actually enslaved their Central American pickers to force them to pick tomatoes. By 2010, nine slavery cases had been brought against Florida tomato growers for the way they treated their laborers, including forcing them, on pain of physical punishment, to work all day for very little pay, and not allowing escape (Coalition).

The Florida tomato pickers, through a collective bargaining and rights organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, named after the region of Florida which is the hub of tomato production, has recently won rights for tomato pickers. The tomato buyers, such as Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell and KFC restaurants; Burger King; Subway; McDonald’s; and food service providers such as Sodexho and Aramark; have agreed to support an additional penny per pound in the cost of tomatoes, which is to be passed on to the workers. They have also agreed to buy only from growers which promise to afford their workers basic human dignities like taking breaks twice a day in the shade, a time clock to ensure they are paid for all the hours they work, and being allowed to use the toilet.

However, one major sector of tomato buyers has refused to sign on to the Immokalee agreement: grocery stores. Wal-Mart, Kroger, Publix and even Trader Joe’s have all refused to sign. In a statement, Trader Joe’s said that its refusal to sign stemmed from the technical language of the agreement and not from the substance of more rights for tomato pickers. Of course, that technical language did not stand in the way for major fast food chains and food service providers. Trader Joe’s is a haven for liberal, urban grocery shoppers, but here they are, taking a hard line on fair practices in labor in order to protect their prices and their competitive edge. When it comes to tomatoes, shoppers would be doing more to support workers’ rights by eating at Burger King or McDonald’s than by shopping at Trader Joe’s. The tomato example shows how hard it is, as individuals, to use our purchasing power to influence the greater good. The path from the food in the ground, through the grocery store, to our table is circuitous and far-removed from us. So are the lives of those who grow and harvest it.

Migrant workers are laborers who travel from state to state following the harvest, picking fruits and vegetables for our grocery stores and restaurants. The readings we heard this morning, one a prayer by Cesar Chavez and one an essay by an 11-year-old migrant worker, date from the 1970s, when Chavez’s United Farmworkers Unoin successfully protested the terrible working conditions on California’s large farms. Yet thee conditions persist today, partly because of a surplus of labor owing to immigration, both legal and illegal. According to a 2000 survey by the Department of Labor, among migrant workers today:

88 percent are men, many of them in the U.S. on their own so that they can send money back to families in their home countries.

55 percent are married. Of those, 71 percent are not living with their spouses.

Their mean age is 31. Many start the migrant life in their early 20s and return to their home countries within a few years to live in the homes that were built with U.S. money. “They may return to the United States several more times before they are too old to work such hard jobs.

They have a sixth-grade education, on average.

93 percent are foreign-born, up from 88 percent 10 years ago.

65 percent are here illegally, up from 62 percent 10 years ago (“Migrant”).

Migrant workers used to be Americans–think of the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. But when hiring Americans came to mean dealing with a unionized labor force in the 1970s and 1980s, employers and owners were happy to turn to illegal immigrants desperate for a better way of life.

One of the arguments against mass deportation of illegal immigrants is that such a move would cripple our economy, depriving many industries of the labor they rely on. Arizona businesses have pushed back against that state’s efforts to pass ever stricter immigration laws which would imprison undocumented workers. It’s why immigration laws like the one Alabama has just enacted are so insidious, laws which make it illegal for undocumented workers to seek basic services, and which even pressure children who are American citizens to out their parents as undocumented immigrants to the schools. Laws like these threaten to create a permanent underclass of workers here outside the law, not forced to leave, not welcomed in, and not allowed to participate in the basic goods and right of our society.

Or perhaps this underclass already exists. Although the people occupying it have changed, the existence of a group of poorly treated people who pick our agriculture has always been with us. In the colonial era they were indentured servants. In the early decades of our nation they were African American slaves. Then they were sharecroppers like the Joads, strapped to the land by crushing debt. Now they are illegal immigrants. We have never wanted to create the society necessary to pay agricultural workers a living wage.

Joe Kelaghan, in talking to me about this sermon, told the story of getting pizza at a pizzeria in Norway during a vacation once. The restaurant wasn’t fancy, just a place to grab a pizza and a beer. It wasn’t that much different from Pizza Hut. The big difference was that the pizza cost $40 and the beer $15. Norway has organized its economy so that the workers all along the line of the pizza’s creation are paid a living wage. And they’ve put social safety nets into place to help those in need buy food–even if those in need can’t go out to eat pizza. In such a system, local farms would be more competitive, and home gardening might become more attractive. Our economic system, in which food subsidies for the poor are meager and the gap between the rich and the poor is vast, relies upon labor so cheap it is almost free to tend, pick and often serve our food.

We sing a hymn which begins, “Earth was given as a garden…” In the ancient myth of the garden of Eden, told two ways in the Hebrew Bible, the first humans are given the earth to tend and work. God gives them instructions: in one version of the story, God says, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food (Gen. 1:29).” Even after Adam and Eve have been expelled from the garden, God cures Adam with working the land by the sweat of his brow. Neither in paradise or out of it, in this founding myth of Judaism and Christianity, are people given the fruits of the earth by the labor of other hands. Buddhism exhorts us to recognize the sacred nature in all living things, and certainly in other people. Islam demands fair treatment of members of the community, one of the most sacred concepts of that faith. All the world’s major religions demand fair treatment of one another and stewardship of the Earth’s resources.

These are hard questions, but our commitments as Unitarian Universalists require us to grapple with them. Part of what we affirm as Unitarian Universalists is the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Having inherent worth and dignity means that a person should not be condemned because of the honest work which occupies her days. The right of the democratic process means workers should have the right to organize and work together for greater justice in the workplace. Honoring the interdependent web of all existence means that we acknowledge how we are tied to migrant workers in American fields, even if we have never done that work; even if we never know them; even if they are Central American; even if they have come to this country illegally. Our Unitarian Universalism requires us to see in these workers a common humanity with us, a common human spirit and dignity which cannot be bartered away. May we work toward a social system where the labor of all is given fair value.

Please join me in a Blessing Prayer, used by the National Farm Worker Ministry.

Bless the hands of the people of the earth,
The hands that plant the seed,
The hands that bind the harvest,
The hands that carry the burden of life.

Soften the hands of the oppressor and
Strengthen the hands of the oppressed.

Bless the hands of the workers,
Bless the hands of those in power above them
That the measure they deal will be tempered
With justice and compassion. Amen.

Sources

All Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.

“Blessing Prayer.” National Farm Worker Ministry. Accessed 15 Oct. 2011. http://nfwm.org/education-center/worship-resources/prayers/.

Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “CIW Anti-Slavery Campaign.” Accessed 14 Oct. 2011. http://www.ciw-online.org/slavery.html.

“Migrant Labor in the United States.” Politics and Economy: On the Border. Now. 28 May 2004. Public Broadcasting System. Accessed 14 Oct. 2011. http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/migrants.html.

Tags: Anti-racism, Money and Spirituality, Social justice
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Forgiveness: Sermon for October 9, 2011

October 26th, 2011

©The Rev. Sarah C. Stewart

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar. Coming about a week after Rosh Ha’shanah, the New Year celebration, it bookends the beginning of a new sacred year and a new reading of the Torah in synagogue. Rosh Ha’shanah is a day of celebration and good wishes for a new year. Yom Kippur, by contrast, is much more sober. During the week between Rosh Ha’shanah and Yom Kippur, faithful Jews are supposed to find a chance to talk to anyone they have wronged in the past year and ask forgiveness. Finally, during the Yom Kippur service, worshipers say a prayer titled “Kol Nidre,” meaning, “All vows.” The prayer releases them from vows they may make to God in the coming year which they will not be able to keep. It reads:

All vows, obligations, oaths, and anathemas
which we may vow, swear, or pledge, or whereby we
may be bound, from this Yom Kippur until the next
(whose happy coming we await), we do repent.
May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and
void, and made of no effect;
they shall not bind us nor have power over us.
The vows shall not be reckoned vows;
the obligations shall not be obligatory;
nor the oaths be oaths (Craughwell 95).

It may seem unusual to ask ahead of time for vows to God to be annulled (and this prayer only applies to vows made to God, not those made to other people.) But the Jewish people have often found themselves living under the rule of hostile religions and regimes; Jewish people and communities have often been faced with a coerced choice between forced conversion and slaughter. This prayer is an up-front agreement with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that any such vows made to foreign gods or ways of worship will be annulled even as they take place. It has allowed the Jewish community to stay whole even in the face of terrible persecution.

In modern times, Yom Kippur has become a time focused more on interpersonal forgiveness. The Jewish tradition asks us: how can we come into sacred community together for a new year if we have not torn down the barriers between us? A member here asked me last summer if I would consider a sermon on forgiveness, and I realized that even though I have preached on forgiveness before, I could certainly do it again. Indeed, there are probably a few topics which all sermons could be about: love each other, the importance of human compassion and kindness, the role of imagination and acceptance of diversity in religion–and forgiveness would be high on that list. We are all failing to live up to our expectations for how we will treat each other, all the time.

The moral weight of forgiveness does not rest only on our interpersonal reactions. The Jewish tradition, which sets such a high bar for the righting of personal relationships, also requires an economic forgiveness when debts become too big. We heard a passage from the Torah this morning, specifically from the revision of Jewish law adopted in 622 BCE under King Josiah. The “sabbath year,” observed one year out of every seven, had already existed, and had involved clemency toward strangers and allowing the land to lie fallow.

But in this revision, the seventh year came to be a time for the forgiveness of monetary debt, as well. Debts could be held and interest collected for seven years–but then, in the seventh year, the debt was to be forgiven. This law probably did not cover debts to foreigners, but only debts within a small and tightly-knit community (Atwood 48). The law even specifies that creditors should not become reluctant to lend as the seventh year approaches. It’s so different from how our society handles money, it’s hard to imagine how the Deuteronomic system even worked.

Really, though, is our system working so well? Before and during the housing meltdown, there was a lot of handwringing among commentators and civic leaders about the high levels of household debt in the United States. By 2009, the ratio of debt to household wealth in the U.S. had reached 65%–households in America owed more than half their collective wealth to others. Why had so many people spent beyond their means, our leaders asked. What can we do about it?

The government tried to help homeowners who were struggling with mortgages worth more than the houses they had helped to buy with the TARP program. This program, with the hopes of many riding on it, has failed to help very many Americans because families needed to be pretty financially healthy to participate in it, and banks were reluctant to work with even those families. We heard the phrase “moral hazard” a lot, both in relation to banks which had become “too big to fail,” but also in reference to American households which had borrowed more than they could afford to pay. “Writing down the loan principal for homeowners underwater on their mortgages creates a moral hazard,” a commentator might say. People not stuck in such a situation nodded wisely.

A countering voice among us says that the moral hazard lies in allowing the gap between the wealthy and the poor, between the employed and the unemployed, between the debtors and the creditors to yaw so wide we cannot cross it. Margaret Atwood, in her essays for Radio Canada on indebtedness of all kinds, writes about the danger of overburdening the people, which has often taken the form of overtaxation. She gives the example of the 1381 rebellion in England, started by a poll tax intended to raise war funds, and to return the poor to serfdom at a time when the Black Death had killed many agricultural laborers in England and made the value of their labor much higher than the king intended to give them through a feudal system. Atwood writes, “[The rebels] did kill some people before being defeated and executed in horrible ways, but they mainly assaulted the tax collectors and burnt their records. Without memory there is no debt, and a written record is a form of memory; and whenever there’s been a tax-and-debt-inspired uprising, one of the prime targets has been the tax and debt records (141-42).”

In our country, we are not perhaps having the taxes ground out of us to enrich the government. Many in our country are, however, having debt payments ground out of them to enrich the already wealthy. And even though the bottom 40% of earners in the United States don’t pay income tax, they do pay payroll taxes, property taxes and (in most places) sales taxes. These taxes don’t necessarily fund the programs they would like to receive in return. Movements like Occupy Wall Street, and even the phenomenon of people walking away from mortgages they can no longer afford, are a kind of debt uprising. We might even put the Tea Party in this category, although it is calling for less taxation and fewer services, instead of redistributed taxation and more services and fairness. These popular movements demand a fundamental change in how money moves around our economic and political systems. It demands an end to the outrageous level of indebtedness required of so many people who want to get an education, live in a house or receive medical care.

Our financial world is a world without forgiveness. Debts live as long as we do. Some can be traded through a process called bankruptcy, in which a family discharges its debts (ideally while keeping the home they live in) in exchange for a very poor credit rating for seven years. (There’s the seven years again, moving across space and time from ancient Hebrew law to ours.) The credit rating might keep them from borrowing any more, but could also interfere with trying to rent a new home or get a better job, so it’s a serious trade to consider. Student loans cannot be discharged even through bankruptcy. We are fortunate that debts do not follow us after death: creditors may try to get repayment out of the estate of a deceased relative, but they cannot come to us unless we co-signed on the loan. People no longer have to go to debtor’s prison, although we could argue about whether poverty drives our hugely increasing prison population. In financial terms, there is very little forgiveness.

So where does that leave us with interpersonal forgiveness? It’s strange to me that we live in a world that suggests that it is better to forgive than to bear a grudge forever when we’re talking about interpersonal, emotional relationships, but not when we’re talking about money. Which way is better? Sometimes it’s easy to forgive someone, because the thing they did that upset you is something you are able to get over. Your friend forgets the date you had planned and leaves you high and dry. You loan something precious to your cousin and it is lost; even if she offers to pay for it, she can’t quite make it up to you. We have to forgive these slights as a matter of course just to get through our lives with other people. They may let us down sometimes, but they are there to support us and help us at other times. Besides, we are all guilty of letting people down ourselves. We all require forgiveness from time to time.

However, there are those events in life that are not so easy to forgive. There are transgressions that violate the basic rules of the relationship we have with others. The unfaithful spouse. The parent who doesn’t do right by us when we are children. The friend who lets us down or betrays us in our hour of need. A friend recently pointed out to me that what we ask, again and again, when faced with these betrayals is “Why?” We want to know how our trust could have been so broken. But the answer, my friend said, is that even the person whom we need to forgive does not know how to answer our “why.” Our relationship with them is only one part of who they are, and they weren’t paying attention to that relationship when they violated it. Who they are is more multifaceted than we had known it to be–they are, in fact, a different person than we thought they were. We had trusted them beyond their ability to commit.

This does not make betrayal less painful. But it does present us with questions we might be able to answer, unlike that anguished “why.” One question is: knowing what we know now about who our loved one is, can we rebuild a relationship with that person? Can we accept them as a more broken person than we knew them to be? Can we recognize our own brokenness, and the ways in which we need to be understood by them? Are they still a person we can love and trust? Many times, the answer to this question is “no”; the betrayal was too deep or the potential for future pain too great. But even if we decide to break it off with someone who wounded us, another question remains.

This question is: whether or not we can enter into relationship with the person again, can we let the pain and resentment of their hurt go from our hearts? For a while after trust is broken, hurt is an unavoidable response. But there can come a point where we hold on to our hurt in the place of the relationship we used to have. That relationship has been broken and we’re not sure it can exist anymore; and in its familiar place, close to our heart, we have this hurt. Too often, we cherish the hurt instead of looking for new relationships, whether with the same person or with someone else. The naked truth about forgiveness is that it’s not for the other person at all. It’s a task to be done for our own spiritual health, to open us up to enriching relationships with other people and move beyond our own suffering.

In the United States, this is the question we face with regard to the staggering debt and unemployment so many Americans face. Regardless of the mistakes those Americans made that got them where they are today–and regardless of the mistakes our society made that created a staggering gulf between the rich and the poor–can we repair our community to allow human relationships to flourish again? Can we do the work that would take, even if it will benefit ordinary Americans along with major corporations? Even if we are people who have held onto our jobs and kept up with our mortgage payments, I believe we would be a stronger country if we found it in our hearts to create structural change for our neighbors who are less well-off. Our neighbors create our communities with us, and they and their children will be our help and support in the future. The same forgiveness we try to find in our hearts should be what we search for as a country.

As we come together in prayer, I invite you to join hands.

Feel the warmth and the grasp of the hand in yours. Picture the face of your neighbor. This person–whatever the color of their skin, whatever the gender of their spouse, whatever job they have or have had, however much money they have–this person is your fellow and neighbor in this fellowship and in our community. Feel your common humanity together.

Together, as a community, help us support one another and have compassion toward each other. Help us come to each other with a simple heart when we need to forgive and when we need forgiveness. Help us to see that the path we walk on must be broad enough for all our brothers and sisters together.

If we have wronged someone, give us the strength to ask forgiveness. If we have been wronged, give us the clarity to let go of endless hurt and anger. May the spirit of this community be with us as we build relationships founded on honesty and loving-kindness. Amen.

Sources

Atwood, Margaret. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Toronto: Harper, 2008.

“Kol Nidre (All Vows).” Every Eye Beholds You: A World Treasury of Prayer. Ed. Thomas J. Craughwell. New York: Harcourt, 1998. 95.

Tags: Ethical living, Judaism, Money and Spirituality
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Excellence in Ministry: Sermon for October 2, 2011

October 26th, 2011

The collection we took this morning will support Association Sunday, a special fundraising effort of the Unitarian Universalist Association. This year, Association Sunday is supporting Excellence in Ministry, an umbrella initiative designed to improve Unitarian Universalist ministry in a number of ways. The thing I am most excited about, however, within Excellence in Ministry, is an emphasis on multicultural competence and training. Now, I have my share of white liberal awareness about the need for anti-racism and multiculturalism, same as many of you. But recently, I’ve come to see the need for greater diversity and greater understanding of multiculturalism in our ministry.

I serve on a committee of the Board of Trustees of the Association which is responsible for appointing people to denominational committees. We are in the midst of a round of appointments now. Out of some 40 applicants to 15 positions, three were people of color. I spent an hour or so this week on the appointments for one committee, trying to figure out the ethnic and racial heritage of the four people going off the committee, and sifting through fifteen applications to see if we could provide any racial diversity or balance at all.

After all that work, I determined that all the applicants for a committee serving the seminarians of the entire western third of the United States were white people. People of color, people hoping to become Unitarian Universalist ministers, will come before that committee early in their seminary careers to be guided along their path. And they will see no faces which mirror their own, no person on the committee whom they could expect to have had similar experiences and challenges arising from race as they have had. A program to increase multicultural experience and skill in our ministry, in addition to encouraging more people of color to enter and succeed in our ministry, is sorely needed.

Multiculturalism is not just about race. The Rev. Mark Morrison Reed, an African American man and a minister of 32 years’ experience, has pointed out that the percentage of African Americans in the Unitarian Universalist ministry has kept pace almost exactly with the percentage of African Americans in the United States who receive a college education (“Perversity”). In other words, our association is even more class-bound than it is race-bound; as people of color move into the educated classes which make up our congregations, they also enter our ministry.

This shows us that race is not the only barrier members and clergy find in Unitarian Universalism: there is also a barrier of class, keeping our congregations largely middle- and upper-class. These divisions of race and class must be met by our churches in order to make a difference in our world. Right now people in the United States and worldwide are protesting because the middle class is ever more out of reach and because they think they may never get there. Unitarian Universalism must be open to the people engaged in this struggle.

Although the Unitarian Universalist Association’s effort is named “Excellence in Ministry,” the commitment to diversity must exist within congregations if anything is to improve. Take my committee, for instance. We look for people of color to serve on denominational committees, but in order for that to happen, those people must apply. In order for more people of color, and people from diverse class backgrounds, to apply, they must be members of Unitarian Universalist congregations. Their ministers and lay leaders must encourage them to get involved at the denominational level. This is just one example of the connection between good ministry and good congregations. Jack Mendelsohn, a Unitarian Universalist minister, wrote,

A Unitarian Universalist minister is a [person] who continually runs out of time, out of wisdom, out of ability, out of courage and out of money. He is hurtable. His tasks involve great responsibility and little power. He must learn to accept people where they are and go on from there. He must never try to exercise influence he does not possess. If he is worth his salt, he knows all this, and is still thankful every day of his life for the privilege of being what he is.

The future of the liberal church is almost totally dependent on these two factors: great congregations (whether large or small), and skilled, effective, dedicated ministers. The strangest feature of their relationship is that they create one another (11-12).

This congregation has created two ministers–Elizabeth Stevens and Paul Sawyer. I came out of a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Almost all our ministers do. Congregations like Starr King Fellowship form and grow leadership within themselves, and those leaders go on to create greater strength in their home congregations and in the wider faith.

I’d like to introduce you to someone who does Unitarian Universalist ministry in a very different way from how I do it. One of the joyful realizations I have had as a minister is that there as many ways of serving our faith and the greater good as there are people willing to do it. The person I’d like you to meet in this sermon is the Rev. Karen Tse, a classmate of mine from divinity school. Even in seminary, Karen knew she wanted to be a community minister. She was already trained as a lawyer when she started divinity school. She had worked as a public defender in San Francisco, and had traveled to Cambodia to train public defenders, judges and prosecutors under the auspices of the United Nations.

Karen understood her work as a sacred calling, but she didn’t see her career unfolding within a congregation. She had a vision: she wanted to start a non-governmental organization which would work for the rights of political prisoners in China when they went before the courts as defendants. She moved to Europe and started her own organization, International Bridges to Justice, in 2000, which works to strengthen public defense and support the rights of the accused in China and elsewhere, with a special focus on the rights of indigent people accused of crimes.

For Karen, this work is the work of ministry. It is work connected to the community of Unitarian Universalists because it carries out the vision of a world where the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and the practice of freedom, are respected and upheld. This is not congregational ministry, and it’s not even ministry connected to a particular area or congregation. It is Unitarian Universalist spiritual leadership and justice-making writ large. Karen will be preaching at next summer’s General Assembly, a meeting of representatives from Unitarian Universalist congregations specially dedicated to justice and the rights of immigrants and minorities in our country. Karen will remind us that her work has value in developing countries as well as in our own country, and can be brought home to our congregations.

“Excellence in Ministry,” the project we are supporting this morning, represents a project being worked on by our Association and the Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association. The funds raised today by Unitarian Universalist congregations across the country will support coaching for ministers; development of multicultural competency in the ministry; training for ministers, religious educators and musicians to learn how to create multigenerational worship together; as well as other initiatives.

Personally, I’m excited about the coaching program. Seminarians and ministers early in their careers must show that they are constantly improving and increasing their skills in the ministry. But once a minister passes that early stage–for me, after three years of professional ministry–no further certification is required. The coaching program will help experienced ministers get even better in certain areas of ministry.

I’m also excited about the emphasis on multigenerational worship and working together across the boundaries of our professions. Last year, our Director of Religious Education Cindy Spring and I began experimenting with multigenerational worship here at Starr King Fellowship. Once a month, we created a 45-minute-long multigenerational worship service, designed to appeal to adults and children alike. We learned along the way: the material has to be accessible at many levels and presented in an engaging way. Putting multigenerational materials on the one Sunday a month when we didn’t have Sunday school asked families to come to church every single Sunday, something we don’t ask other members to do. Attendance among both children and adults dropped on Family Sundays.

So this year, we will are building on what we learned. We will have some Sundays of full-length multigenerational services. Whitney Howarth, who went to a conference this summer on multigenerational worship, is going to work with me to create just such a service on the Real Story of Thanksgiving next month. On other Sundays, once a month or so, the children will once again join us for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the service, before heading downstairs to their classes. But instead of moving through the ordinary opening of our services and telling the children a story, we will recreate the entire time they are with us to be multigenerational and engage our worshiping bodies and senses as a whole congregation.

Whether as a full service or the beginning of our services, we will work more to break through the forms and boundaries of our traditional worship service, to open up a place where people of all ages and generations can worship together. We are Starr King Fellowship together–not one fellowship for adults and another for children. We come together in worship to approach the world of the spirit.

Congregations need ministers and create them; and ministers need and create congregations. I reflect from time to time on the nature of what I’m doing. It’s fair to say that when I started out, I had no clue, so it’s probably also fair that in another ten or twenty years I will look back at this moment and think I still had no clue. But as best as I can figure out, ministry is the process of becoming oneself in the midst of community.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it was “life passed through the fire of thought.” I find, as a minister, that it’s not a matter of trying to live my life perfectly as a paragon of virtue–which is a good thing, because I, like any human being, would fail. Instead it’s about living my life as best I can. I apologize when I mess up. I stand for things I believe in, even if other people disagree. I make the best decisions I can. I try to be as compassionate as possible, and I’m very aware that sometimes it’s not enough. In other words, I try to be human on purpose, which is what we ask of each other as Unitarian Universalists in the first place.

Professional ministry is a collection of skills and abilities. It is a calling, in the sense that people don’t become ministers because of the great pay or the high esteem in which society will hold them. They don’t graduate from college and think, “The best way to repay these student loans and retire early on the beach is to head off to divinity school.” On the other hand, the quality of life and the work we ministers get to do is extraordinary.

This week I met with a couple about their wedding, helping them prepare for the moment when they will say, “I do.” I made appointments to visit people in their homes. I met with people who give their time and energy to this congregation out of the goodness of their hearts, because they believe in the possibility of what committed people can do in this world by working together. I made plans for Pakistani musicians to perform here and share a meal with us together here. I spent a day writing. It’s fantastic work, and it is a privilege to do it. It is an even greater privilege to share the blessings and work of ministry with you, an engaged and faithful congregation of Unitarian Universalists. The ministry of all of us grows together and will flourish, with our help, for generations to come.

Sources

“Karen I. Tse.” Wikipedia. 17 Sep. 2011. Accessed 1 Oct. 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_I._Tse.

Mendelsohn, Jack. “Excerpt from Why I Am a Unitarian Universalist.” Association Sunday 2011: Celebrating Excellence in Ministries: Organizing and Worship Resources. Ed. Unitarian Universalist Assn. Boston: UUA, 2011. 11-12.

Morrison-Reed, Mark. “The Perversity of Diversity.” General Assembly. Salt Lake City, 25 June 2009.

Tags: Ministry, Religious education, Unitarian Universalism
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Universalism, Then and Now: Sermon for Sunday, September 28, 2011

September 28th, 2011

When I was a kid, my relationship with my grandparents’ church started out fine and became more difficult. They lived in south Florida, where they had lived their entire adult lives, and where they were founding members of their southern Presbyterian church. They went to church twice a week and much of their social life revolved around the other members there. My grandfather was an elder, an ordained lay position of leadership within the church. (The Presbyterian Church in America did not then, and still does not, ordain women to be elders or ministers.)

As a child, starting about when I was seven years old, I spent two or three weeks every summer in Florida with my grandparents, and while I was there, their church became part of my life, too. As a young child I enjoyed it. Communion grape juice was given in little plastic cups, which was enchantingly different from the practice in my family’s Episcopal church. And Vacation Bible School was fun. I remember singing songs and painting rocks.

Things began to get complicated when I was a teenager. One Wednesday night, we went to church for Bible study. While the adults stayed in one room to discuss a scripture passage, the teens all went to another room with a youth pastor. He gave us a sermon. He told us that we, as young people, were sitting on a fence. On one side was a happy place, a world full of love, success, and time spent with those we cared for most. On the other side was a life of crime and addiction. He told us that if we did not choose to accept Jesus as our personal lord and savior, we would fall off the fence onto the wrong side. He suggested (perhaps without coming right out to say it) that all the people in the world already who were criminals or addicts had probably failed to properly accept Christ into their hearts.

I knew, right then, that the youth pastor’s explanation was dead wrong. Back home in the suburbs of Detroit, about half my classmates were Jewish. A respect for Judaism and other religions was built into our student life, and had been reinforced by the four years of Unitarian Universalist religious education I had had by that time. Plenty of my friends and their families were not Christian, let alone the kind of evangelical Christian this pastor was insisting upon. I could see from my own experience that what he was teaching was wrong. I was angry and felt stifled, because I knew that to argue with the youth pastor and the other teens would embarrass my grandparents.

The belief that the details of your religion are not part of what makes you a good person: this is Universalism. Universalism is part of the name of our faith and part of our heritage as a religion. Universalists began to come out of congregational churches in New England, especially northern New England, at the end of the 18th century. They formed their own churches, centered on a theology of universal salvation and social justice in this world. Universalism spread throughout the United States, especially to what was the frontier of Ohio and Kentucky.

Universalism was radical at the time. The Congregational churches the Universalists came out of were strictly Calvinist, meaning they believed that God had decided at the beginning of time who would go to heaven and who to hell. Calvinist Congregationalists believed that election to heaven would surely show itself in good behavior, so one encouragement to good behavior was to try to receive the assurance of saving grace from God. Calvinists believed that without the threat of hell which hung over the head of the vast majority of people–many of them faithful Christians–there would be no impetus to good behavior. It was so scandalous to be a Universalists at the turn of the 19th century that women often would not put their names on the church membership list, lest their neighbors think they had lost all their morals.

However, despite the theological turn of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, universalism with a small “u” is a theology as old as Christianity itself. In Judaism, the religion of Jesus himself, there is not a lot of concern with heaven and hell. The Hebrew Bible does not make much reference to hell as a physical or metaphysical place of eternal suffering. The word “heaven” is used as a synonym for the name of God, because it was considered blasphemous to pronounce God’s name. The Psalms refer to a place called “Sheol,” a kind of dark, underground place where people go when they die. Jewish eschatology, the belief in the end times, in Jesus’ time and today, says that in the time to come, when the Messiah has come, everyone (not just Jews) will be raised from the dead to exist in covenant with God.

Jesus, a faithful Jew himself, spoke about a place of suffering, likening it to a burning trash pit outside of Jerusalem, “Gehenna.” Jesus spoke of separating the lambs from the goats during a future time of judgment–although, in a well-known passage in the gospel of Matthew, he said that the “sheep”–the good people–would be known by their acts of loving kindness to those in need, and not by the state of their faith or their election by God. When people asked him how to enter the kingdom of which he spoke, he told them not to accept him as their personal lord and savior, but rather to give their wealth to the poor and act with kindness and compassion toward everyone. Jesus was not interested in an us and a them. He preached a radical–and universal–equality.

The 3rd century theologian Origen picked up on the potential universality of God’s saving grace. He lived and wrote in Alexandria, Egypt. He believed in the mystical and spiritual truth of the Bible–not the literal truth, since even then careful readers of the Bible could find the places where a literal reading was impossible. He believed that human souls had pre-existed with God before coming into particular bodies, and that those same souls–all of them–would return to God after death.

Another early Universalist was the 7th century bishop of Nineveh named Isaac, who wrote, “It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction…for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned (MacCulloch 250).” The human propensity for dividing people into winners and losers, an in group and an out group, has ensured that Christianity has focused more on judgment than on universal salvation through the years. But the minority view of universal salvation has been part of the Christian story for a very long time.

I’m sure my grandparents were relieved that I did not remain 15 years old forever. After that youth ministry meeting which angered me so much, my attitude toward my grandparents’ church mellowed. I still didn’t agree with their theology, but I could see the care the church gave my grandparents as they aged, and the good the church did in the community. At my grandfather’s internment, their minister and I even swapped some good-natured shop talk about the best ways to plant new churches.

However, after my grandmother’s funeral a few years later, I found myself once again mystified by their theology of heaven and hell. My grandmother was a good woman, kind to everyone, active in her community, with many friends who loved her. The minister said all these things at her funeral. He said that he was sure as faithful a woman as she was heaven now, assured of a future in eternity with God. It was a comforting thought for all of us who loved her, gathered in grief together.

But it made me wonder: what does the pastor say at the funerals of people who led fractious lives, or who were not devout in their prayer? What about people who treated others harshly, or weren’t good at keeping the commandments in the Bible? Does the pastor ever stand up during a funeral and say, “Well, we can’t know the mind of God, but I’m pretty sure this one isn’t getting into heaven. He’s in the other place, probably. Too bad for him.”

One evangelical Christian preacher who has challenged this Calvinist view of heaven recently is Rob Bell. Bell is the lead pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He and his church are Christian and evangelical, intent on spreading the message of God and Jesus as recorded in the Bible. However, there is a big difference between Bell’s theology and the theology of other evangelical, and certainly fundamentalist, Christian pastors in America. Bell preaches a theology of a large-hearted and loving God who will ultimately bring all people into life with Godself.

Now, this is not Universalism with a capital “U” as we practice it here. Bell believes in something theologians call “anonymous Christianity,” which says that Jesus will save everyone, whether they have professed belief in him or not. This theological view takes Jesus’ teachings as normative, and suggests that in the afterlife, living with a heart out of alignment with these teachings will cause such unbearable suffering for the person that he or she will be forced to change. He gives the example of a racist in heaven, forced to treat people of all ethnicities and skin colors as equals, even having to eat together and praise God together. Bell says this racist would be pretty miserable until he learned to give up his racism.

Theology like this is called “anonymous Christianity” because it assumes that anyone anywhere who follows the content of Jesus’ teachings, regardless of whether they claim to be a Christian, is in fact following Jesus. It’s a much bigger and more accommodating theology than those which claim that only believing in God or Jesus a certain way, or only going through certain ritual actions, will get you into heaven. But it does not take seriously the real convictions and requirements of other religious practices, or the ethical commitments of those who follow none. It does show that universalist theology with a little “u” is alive and well, even at the heart of the Christian debate.

Our Universalism, with a big “U,” the one that’s in our name of Unitarian Universalism, has always seemed to me even bigger than Bell’s. We admit that we don’t know for sure what will happen to us after we die, although many of us might have faith in an afterlife of some kind. Not knowing for sure what is coming, seen through the lens of Universalism, leads us to two places. The first is rooted in our historical Universalist theology, which tells us that the ground and source of our being–that which our Universalist theology names God–is loving. In many Universalist churches in America, the sentence “God is Love” was inscribed proudly on the sanctuary wall.

Believing that that which bounds our existence is loving, Universalists believe that such a loving presence would not condemn any creature to eternal suffering. If we believe in heaven, this is the belief that all creatures, loved by God, will go to heaven. If we do not, a humanist understanding of Universalism is that after death, we will experience peace, even if that is because our experience as living minds will have ended. Either way, there is no room for the torments of hell.

The second place Universalism leads us is to a compassionate and energetic effort to make this world in which we live a better place. If the next world is taken care of, that leaves us the very important work of trying to make this one a little less like the hell we don’t believe exists. Universalists, like their Unitarian cousins, worked during the 19th and 20th centuries in America for social justice and human welfare. Today, when our association and our congregations work for social issues such as immigrants’ rights and fair treatment under the law, we are working out of our Universalist heart. We work for the rights of all because we believe that all people, regardless of their faith commitments, their race, their sexuality, gender or class, deserve equal rights and equal freedoms.

Very few of us have the luxury of dying at exactly the right moment. Very few of us die with everything settled for the better between us and our fellow humans, or between us and God. Very few of us have the privilege of being right with existence before we die. We have all lost people in painful moments, grieving that important years of their lives went un-lived. We have all wanted to pull a loved one back from the abyss of death to reconcile those things we never worked out with him or her. We have known people who suffered in life, who struggled to find happiness and acceptance and peace. Our Universalism teaches us that wherever our story is cut off at the end of our lives, that is not the final judgment on who we are. Whether it is in the next life of our souls, or in the memories and hearts of those who care for us on earth, we will be carried in compassion and love even after we have died.

Please join me in prayer.

We lift up our hearts today to the source and sum of compassion in the universe, to that collective of the human spirit and to that transcendent Spirit which calls us to our best selves. We ask to know in our heart of hearts that we live in the embrace of love and acceptance.

We turn our hearts to those we have lost, those whom we loved who have gone from us. We hold them still in the warmth of love and memory, and we keep their spirits alive by remembering them this morning. I invite you to say aloud the names of those you wish brought into our circle this morning.

As we remember them, they are with us still. As we carry their goodness and wish for a better world with us, they are with us on the peaceable way, loved and loving in our hearts still. Amen.

Sources

Bell, Rob. Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: VikingPenguin, 2010.

Origen. Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings. Ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar. Trans. Robert J. Daly. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984.

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In Fellowship

Pragmatism: Sermon for January 8, 2012

Different Beliefs, Common Covenant: Sermon for December 11, 2011

What Is Love?: Sermon for December 4, 2011

The Five Points of the New Theology: Sermon for November 9, 2011

Suffering and Compassion: Sermon for November 6, 2011

Goddesses, Past and Present: Sermon for October 30, 2011

Forgiveness: Sermon for October 9, 2011

Excellence in Ministry: Sermon for October 2, 2011

Universalism, Then and Now: Sermon for Sunday, September 28, 2011

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