Opening Words:
Let us gather for worship mindful of the words of Mark Morrison-Reed, who wrote:
The central task of religious community
Is to unveil the bonds that bind each to all…
Once felt, it inspires us to act for justice.
It is the church that assures us
that we are not struggling for justice on our own…
[Our] community is essential,
for alone our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen,
and our strength is too limited to do all that must be done.
Together, our vision widens and our strength is renewed.
Meditation: by Mary Oliver a poem entitled “Mysteries, Yes”
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
Reading: by Edwin Markham, who was Oregon’s poet laureate in the 1920s. This is from a poem entitled “Earth is Enough.” It begins: “We men [and women] of earth have here the stuff of paradise – we have enough!” The rest of the poem is set to music in one of our hymns (Singing the Living Tradition, #312). It goes:
Here on the paths of every day
Here on the common human way
Is all the stuff the gods would take
To build a heaven, to mold and make
New Edens. Ours the task sublime
To build eternity in time.
We need no other stones to build
The temple of the unfulfilled
No other ivory for the doors
No other marble for the floors
No other cedar for the beam
And dome of our eternal dream.
Reading: a story from the Hindu tradition (Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart, edited by Feldman and Kornfield, p. 292)
There was a man who wandered throughout the world seeking his deepest desire. He wandered from one city to another, from one realm to another looking for fulfillment and happiness, but in all his wanderings never came to it. Finally one day, tired from his search, he sat down underneath a great tree at the foot of a mountain. What he did not know is that this was The Great Wish Fulfilling Tree. Whatever one wishes for when seated underneath it immediately becomes true.
As he rested in his weariness he thought to himself, “What a beautiful spot this is. I wish I had a home here,” and instantly before his eyes a lovely home appeared. Surprised and delighted he thought further, “Ah, if only I had a partner to be here with me, then my happiness would be complete,” and in a moment a beautiful [partner] appeared calling him “husband” and beckoning to him. “Well, first, I am hungry,” he thought. “I wish there was food to eat.” Immediately a banquet table appeared covered with every wonderful kind of food and drink, main courses, pastries, sweets of every variety. The man sat down and began to feast himself hungrily, but partway through the meal, still feeling tired he thought, “I wish I had a servant to serve me the rest of this food,” and sure enough a […] servant appeared.
Finishing the meal the man sat back down to lean against this wonderful tree and began to reflect, “How amazing it is that everything I wish has come true. There is some mysterious force about this tree. I wonder if there is a demon who lives in it,” and sure enough no sooner than he thought this than a great demon appeared. “Oh my,” he thought, “this demon will probably eat me up,” and that is just what it did.
Reading: an anecdote from the Hassidic Jewish tradition (Tales of Hasidim – Book Two: The Later Masters, by Martin Buber, p.303)
Where does God live? – When Rabbi Yitzhak Meir was a little boy his mother once took him to see the maggid of Koznitz. There someone said to him: “Yitzhak Meir, I’ll give you a gulden if you tell me where God lives!” He replied: “And I’ll give you two gulden if you tell me where he doesn’t!.”
And Now for the Good News
A Sermon Delivered on January 22, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
“Houston, we have a problem.” This is what one of the three astronauts on board Apollo 13 said when speaking with ground control on April 14, 1970. At the time the rocket was on the third day of its journey to the moon, about 200,000 miles away from earth. A few moments earlier, one of their oxygen tanks had exploded, and the astronauts were in serious trouble. They’d heard a loud bang, the power in the capsule suddenly fluctuated erratically, and their thruster rockets started firing. Initially they thought they had been hit be a freak meteor.
Amazingly, despite the serious damage to their spacecraft, limited power, loss of cabin heat, water shortage, computer troubles, and navigational challenges, the rocket did not crash, nor did it spin out of control, sending its passengers into outer space.
Thanks to the incredible ingenuity of the crew, both in the capsule and on the ground, they were able to cope with all of their technical failures, as they became evident, improvising solutions. For instance, the ground crew anticipated that rising carbon dioxide levels would become an issue, threatening the astronauts’ survival. So a team of engineers on the ground came up with a plan how the crew could cope, by building their own ad hoc air filtering system which involved jury-rigging extra air filter canisters with some card board, plastic bags and tape they had in the capsule. Following the ground crew’s instructions was like building a model airplane, one astronaut said. They called their contraption “the mailbox.” It wasn’t pretty to look at, but it did the trick.
Given the craft’s trajectory and damage when the oxygen tank exploded, there was no way they could simply turn around, and fly 200,000 miles back to earth. So instead they continued on toward the moon, and once they were within reach of its gravitational field, they used the moon’s gravity as a kind of slingshot, to send them back to the earth. Amazingly, they reached earth, and safely splashed down into the South Pacific three days later on April 17.
The fate of Apollo 13 was quite a story. And because it was a good story, it was made into a movie in 1995, starring Tom Hanks. It made a tidy sum at the box office, and got pretty good reviews. And to tell you the truth, it was Tom Hanks, playing James Lovell, who delivered the memorable line, “Houston, we have a problem.” In real life, what was said was “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” And it was said by Lovell’s co-pilot, Jack Swigert.
* * *
We humans love to tell stories. We love to listen to stories. In fact, we make sense of our lives, through the stories we know.
Our stories speak of challenges we must overcome, and dilemmas we must resolve. They speak of guilt and redemption, of fear and courage, of loneliness and love. Good stories have a message and moral. And while not all stories have a happy end, every good story offers a distinct perspective on the meaning of life.
The story of Apollo 13 has all of these elements, but above all it seems to be the story of a problem, and how that problem was overcome.
And in this way, the story of Apollo 13 has a lot in common with the stories told in all the world’s great religious traditions. All the world’s religions can be understood as attempts to address our most basic existential human problems and to provide solutions to these problems.
Or at least this is the way the renowned religious scholar Stephen Prothero understands the central task of every great religion. As some of you know, a group at church has been discussing Prothero’s book God Is Not One this year.
Last week we read the chapter on Buddhism. We learned that the central human problem Buddhism seeks to address is suffering. Suffering is the greatest challenge we face: the inevitable reality of illness, old age, and death. Everything we have, and everyone we love, will one day be taken away from us. This is the First Noble Truth.
The Second Noble Truth is that suffering has a cause. We suffer because we fail to see the world as it really is. We are blinded by ignorance. The third truth is that just as our suffering has a cause, it also has a solution. “If we wake up to the way the world really is, in all its flux and flow, and stop clinging to things that are by their nature running through our fingers, then we can achieve nirvana,” Prothero says. We can know perfect bliss.
The fourth truth is how we go about putting all of these insights into action, namely by following the Eightfold Path of right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
Buddhism is a wonderfully pragmatic religion. It approaches the challenges of human living with the same matter-of-fact, can-do attitude with which the astronauts and engineers of Apollo 13 analyzed their technical problems, identified causes, proposed solutions, and then put these ideas into action.
Variations of this problem-solving approach can be found in all the great religions. In our discussion group we learned that Muslims believe the central problem of humanity is the illusion of self-sufficiency and acting as if we can get by without God. The solution is cultivating an attitude of submission – which is the meaning of the word “Islam.” Christians see our central problem as sinfulness. The solution is salvation, through Jesus Christ.
* * *
There is a lot to be said for approaching life with a problem-solving attitude. But there are times when the problem-solving approach – how can I put this – is a problem. Sometimes focusing on problems, even when our goal is to alleviate them, only serves to perpetuate them.
This is the moral of the story of the man sitting under The Great Wish Fulfilling Tree. He had a hunch there might be a problem with the tree under which he was sitting. He thought maybe it was inhabited by a demon. And before he knew it, his suspicion became a reality. And that was the end of the man. Not exactly a happy end to this story. But it does have a moral.
The moral of the story is similar to what Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking about, when he said, “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”
Sometimes, if we want to change of our lives for the better, focusing on what we consider “problems” only serves to deepen the problem.
Psychologists have picked up on this strange phenomenon. They have studied it, and gained new insight into how our brain works.
There is a well-known example of what they learned, which I think makes the point nicely. It is a self-administered exercise, which I would like to attempt with you, right now. Are you ready?
OK, here we go. These are your instructions: “Don’t think of an elephant.” (Pause.) Don’t think of an elephant. How are you doing? How many of you are succeeding at not thinking of the elephant?
When confronted with this kind of exercise, our brains can’t help but think of an elephant. That’s simply the way we are wired. Even though thinking of an elephant is a problem we want to avoid, by focusing on this problem we are perpetuating it.
Likewise, if you want to quit smoking, it is actually often counterproductive to do so by focusing on the problem and trying to undo it: “Don’t smoke that cigarette. Don’t smoke that cigarette. Don’t smoke that cigarette that is left in the crumpled packet I know is in the back of the kitchen drawer, leftover for that dinner party a few weeks ago. Don’t smoke that single cigarette, which would probably taste soooo good.”
* * *
Thinking of our lives as a series of problems that we need to solve can actually be counter-productive. Focusing on what we think of as our problems, trying to change them through good intentions, penetrating analysis, self-persuasion, or brute willpower, can be self-defeating. This is true in the life of an individual. And this is particularly true in the life of an organization, or a congregation, like this church.
As you heard earlier this morning, in the weeks ahead, we as a church will be having conversations about the future we envision. We will be taking a new tack as we approach these conversations, guided by a few distinct assumptions.
The first assumption is that “what we focus on becomes our reality.”
Usually when groups of people want to take pro-active steps in shaping their future, they think about their current situation, and how they fall short of their dreams. They focus on their shortcomings, and the shortcomings become their reality. We want to take a different approach.
So, following on the first, we have a second assumption, and it is this: “in every society, organization or group, something works.” The second assumption is: we are doing something well. In fact we are doing a lot of things well. And if we want to do things better in the future, the most effective way to go about it is not to sit down and talk about the things few things we aren’t doing well. Instead, we should think and talk about what we do very well, and do more of it.
Rather than focusing on the 5% that could use improvement, we should focus on the 95% we are good at, and do more of that.
So if you want to quit smoking, don’t spend your time obsessing about the 5% of the day that you have a lit cigarette in your hand. Instead, focus on the 95% of the day you are doing something else. Think about how to increase that. Think about how you got from 90% to 95% and do more of that. Think about when you chewed some gum, when you made some tea, when you went for a walk, instead.
If you want to improve your life, think about moments you have known, when you were at your best. Think about moments when you felt deep joy. Think about moments when the work you did felt relevant and rewarding. Think about moments when you faced a daunting challenge, and you overcame it. Think about moments in which you felt a profound connection to other people – whether co-workers or lovers or strangers. Think of moments when you were guided by a deep sense of purpose, moments that now, in hindsight, you are proud of.
Don’t think about these things in the abstract. Think about specifics. Think about a particular time, and particular people with you. Recount the story of what happened.
Each of our lives is full of stories. True stories. Funny stories. Sad stories. Important stories. These stories shape us. They make us who we are. These stories are worth remembering. They are worth sharing. Especially the stories about when we were at our best.
These are the stories we want to focus on, as we think about our shared future in our church home. There is real power in telling our stories. And there is real power in listening to the stories of others.
This morning we sang: “gather the spirit harvest the power.” Sharing our stories, is how we “gather the spirit of heart and mind.”
* * *
“Houston, we’ve had a problem.” That line marks the beginning of one great, true story. What makes the story great isn’t that there was an accident in outer space, a serious problem for those involved. What makes the story great, is that it tells of people who truly were at their best. People who, in difficult times, pulled together and stuck together, who contributed their best thinking, who mustered amazing courage, who took significant risks and invested incredible energy into a task that they deeply cared about. It is a great story, because though their situation seemed hopeless, in the end the astronauts realized that everything they needed to survive was right there with them, in their tiny capsule.
We love to hear stories like this, because they remind us of moments when we ourselves were at our best, when in the face of challenge or misfortune, we pulled together, when we found reservoirs of courage and skill, we didn’t know we had. And through some combination of resilience, the support of others, and perhaps plain luck, we survived.
* * *
Too often we live our lives as if a far-away heaven were the solution to all our problems. A beautiful, blissful place, but maddeningly unattainable. Too often we act as if finding God were a problem we need to solve… and if we get the right answer, we will get a gulden, a golden reward. But as the rabbi knew, the question itself is misleading. Because, of course, God is everywhere. God is right here.
Everything we need to build heaven, is right here.
But we can’t do it alone. Alone our vision is too narrow.
Together our vision widens and our strength is renewed.
May we join in the task of a building a religious community
that inspires us to act for justice.
May we draw on our abundant insights and experience,
of life at its best.
May we dare to share these stories,
and may we strive to make more of them.
Amen.
