Beyond Life and Death

"Every tiny part of us cries out against the idea of dying, and hopes to live forever."
-- Ugo Betti

Opening Words: 

Let us gather for worship mindful of the words and wisdom of the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote:

To live in this world

you must be able 

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Meditation: a poem by May Sarton entitled “Late Autumn”

On random wires the rows of summer swallows 

Wait for their lift-off. They will soon be gone 

Before All Saints and before All Hallows, 

The changing time when we are most alone. 

Disarmed, too vulnerable, full of dread, 

And once again as naked as the trees 

Before the dark, precarious days ahead 

And troubled skies over tumultuous seas. 

When we are so transparent to the dead 

There is no wall. We hear their voices speak, 

And as the small birds wheel off overhead 

We bend toward the earth suddenly weak. 

How to believe that all will not be lost? 

Our flowers, too, not perish in the blight? 

Love, leave me your South against the frost. 

Say "hush" to my fears, and warm the night.

Reading: by Tom Montgomery Fate from Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father’s Search of the Wild (p. 121)

Our cat Rosie, a gray tabby who now weighs just four pounds, is dying. She’s completely deaf, nearly blind, and has been since spring. But she holds on, and we can’t bring ourselves to put her to sleep. She was five weeks old when Carol and I found her at a shelter… twenty-one years ago. The kids say she’s over one hundred – that a cat year equals five human years. One of my days feels like five to Rosie. The idea intrigues me. How does that work? Is cat time slower because they never worry – about what to say or wear, or if they are late to a meeting? Does Rosie have some sort of heightened kitty consciousness that allows her to live more in the present? Or maybe if I curled up in a bright square of sunlight on the oak floor for a few hours each day, those hours would begin to slow for me too, to elongate, to become something else. I wish the present would slow down…

I think of… decay now, sitting outside at dusk on the back porch of our house. The wild green buzz of summer is gone. The robins and goldfinches and bluebirds have flown south or are preparing to. It is the fall. And everything falls – not just the leaves. The temperature falls as the earth again tilts away from the sun. Darkness falls more quickly as the days shorten. Plants droop and dry up and break apart. Trees fall into dormancy and stop growing. Their leaves and seeds fall into the cool air, and then to the ground, where they will rot and root and become something new. This is the season of decay – a word that means “to fall away” – to return to your constituent parts, to what you are made of. We die and fall apart, but the parts go on. The same is true for the human species. Though lately I’m finding how much harder it is to accept this cycle with people than it is with pets or plants – particularly if they die suddenly, and seem to fall outside the natural cycle of time. 

Reading: by Adama and Naomi Doumbia from The Way of the Elders: West African Spirituality & Tradition (p. 149) 

Death is not the end of life, but a transformation of it. It is a profound crossing over of the soul from this world into the next. When we pass on, we become ancestors, residing close to Spirit. Crossing over is the final and grandest initiation we make in our life journeys. All of our initiations, teachings, lessons are preparation for this final moment where we experience our most significant rite of passage. We now have more influence, more power, and more insight to guide and instruct those who remain embodied. When we cross over, we are able to promote the well-being, the unity, and the peace of the community. Many of us believe in a reincarnation of the spirit. Each time we cross over, Spirit keeps a piece of our soul until we are eventually fully united with Spirit.

Reading: Poem by Ruth Stone “Train Ride”

All things come to an end;

small calves in Arkansas,

the bend of the muddy river.

Do all things come to an end?

No, they go on forever.

They go on forever, the swamp,

the vine-choked cypress, the oaks

rattling last year’s leaves,

the thump of the rails, the kite,

the still white stilted heron.

All things come to an end.

The red clay bank, the spread hawk,

the bodies riding this train,

the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;

the talk goes on forever,

the wide dry field of geese,

a man stopped near his porch

to watch. Release, release;

between cold death and a fever,

send what you will, I will listen.

All things come to an end.

No, they go on forever.

Beyond Life and Death

A Sermon Delivered on October 27, 2013

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

My grandmother had a good death, I think. She was at home in bed, in the house she shared with her daughter – my mother. She was spared long illness and died peacefully last year.

I had seen her just a few weeks earlier, at her hundredth birthday celebration. Though she was frail and couldn’t climb stairs anymore, and though her diminished hearing increasingly turned our conversations into what seemed like one-sided shouting matches – still she was cheerful and lucid. And despite physical limitations that frustrated her, still she was always able to find something to be grateful for. 

She was the kind of person who paid attention to the simple things around her. The way the light fell through the window into her small living room. The latest blossoms to bloom in her garden, or in one of the many flower pots that crowded her windowsill. When she wrote cards – and she wrote a lot of them – she would talk about the walk from which she just returned: the look of the forest after an autumn rain, the smell of the forest, the song of a bird she spied on a nearby branch. And often her cards would contain a small flower or leaf she had found and carefully pressed between the pages of a big book.

My mother once confided to me, that her mother’s unrelenting cheerfulness and quaint observations sometimes drove her crazy. There’s a lot more to life than flowers and birds and the latest change in weather. But in the end, I think we both agreed that the joy my grandmother found in life was not a superficial habit, but expression of a deep spirit. In her hundred years – through two world wars, unspeakable losses and unimaginable change – she had shown amazing fortitude and resilience. 

When I visited her in her late nineties, she told me on more than one occasion that she was ready to die. She had had a good life. She was ready to go. 

Not all of my family members who have died in the course of my life conveyed such equanimity. Among my aunts, uncles, cousins, and my father – more often than not – death was marked by sickness and suffering, sometimes unexpected accident, sometimes suicide. Several died much too early, in their twenties.

The time and circumstances of my grandmother’s death were about as “right” as could be. But still, her death left me deeply shaken. And even though her life was long and rich, her death left me feeling robbed, diminished. A place within me, which had felt her gentle presence all of my life, was now a strange and aching emptiness. What remained was sadness. And a sobering and frightening sense of finality, the unsettling sense that a door has been closed, which can never again be opened. 

* * *

Is it true that death is a door we pass through, which can never be opened again? Is it true that death is irrefutable proof that all things come to an end? Or is death the profound crossing over of the soul from this world into the next?

A lot of people say death is the doorway to a different life. In his book The God Delusion Daniel Dennett cites a survey that says 95 percent of Americans believe in life after death. Other polls offer different answers. The Christian Science Monitor is more conservative and says 75 percent of Americans believe in an afterlife. An International Social Survey says it is closer to 55 percent.

By any of these measures, the members of our church tend to be more skeptical than most Americans. I have conducted a few unscientific surveys over the years. And the general trend here is that about a third of us believe in an afterlife. A third of us say, after death there is nothing. And a third of us are not sure.

* * *

There was a time in my life when I was firmly convinced that when we die, that’s the end. Period. And I imagined those who believe differently were in a state of denial, subject to superstition, or simply seduced by wishful thinking. But today I am less convinced of the wisdom or folly of those on either end of the spectrum. And I now put myself in the “not sure” category.

A good part of my “not sureness” has to do with my uncertainty about how to imagine life after death. Another part is borne of the realization that most people – regardless of their stated beliefs – grieve deeply when someone they have loved dies.

No matter how we make sense of heaven and hell, of this world or the next, the loss we suffer is real. And death – when it finally confronts us – seems strangely unreal. 

The closer we come to death, the more it seems like we are entering a strange liminal space. All our regular routines are put on hold. And the certainties of our lives – what matters and what doesn’t, what is relevant and what isn’t – seem called into question. When we allow ourselves to enter the time and space, the thoughts and feelings, surrounding death, it seems we are stepping into a parallel universe.

In his book The Art of Losing, Kevin Young writes:

“To lose someone today is to go into strange realms of “bereavement specialists” and sympathy cards and funeral arrangements – things you suddenly realize have been going on for a good while, without you, in something of a parallel world. The world of grief can feel like that, a limbo realm that… gives you a strong perspective on the everyday world: Why are all these people walking around, oblivious to loss? Why am I still here while my loved one is not? Surviving any death can carry its own guilt. It also brings a slew of clichés, often in lieu of sympathy, that can sometimes cause more anxiety than comfort. It is hard to know what to say….

In my own grief it was and is the smallest kindnesses that still stick with me [for instance]: the man who gave me my father’s dry cleaning for free, refusing my repeated offers to pay; the dry cleaning I’d had to drive all over town looking for, using old tags found on other of his still-plastic-wrapped clothes as a guide. How to explain “I’m looking for my dead father’s clothes, things he’ll never need,” yet that, duty-bound, you do? Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don’t know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented rush in?” (p. xviii)

* * *

My late colleague Forrest Church, who long served the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City and was a prolific author, wrote eloquently about the mystery and wonder of life and death. In his mind, this is what ritual and religion is all about. Religion, in essence, is “our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die.”

His theology was put to the test when he was diagnosed with cancer in his mid fifties. Initially treatment was very effective. In the years that followed he wrote a poignant and insightful book entitled Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. I highly recommend it.

The year after that, in 2009, he published his final book, The Cathedral of the World: A Universalist Theology. He died in September of the same year. One day after his 61^st birthday.

In this book, he recounts two questions he was asked by parishoners years earlier. A very young girl asked, “Where was I before I was born?” And a few days later a very old woman asked, “What happens after we die?” 

Reflecting on these questions, Church writes, 

“Of all that we experience, there is nothing more natural than birth and death... Looking at this in a purely biological way, without death there would be no birth, not as we know it, for the simplest forms of life never die. For all practical purposes, single-celled organisms are immortal. In other words, we were immortal until we became interesting! …This invites us to reconsider the advantages of immortality…

…I don’t worry all that much about where I was before I was born and where I will be after I die. It is not that they are unimportant questions. It is just that for me the miracle lies in between. [--] No experience of being, unknown to us and probably unknowable, that has taken place before this life or will take place after it, could possibly be more remarkable, more wonderful, or stranger than this life we share today. Life is a miracle couched between mysteries. It is a miracle incarnate, not a given, but a gift, an unaccountable gift.” (p. 187)

* * *

Death is not the enemy of life. But rather life and death are partners in a dance. They are partners in a spiral dance that has been spinning onward and upward for eons. In its wake it creates ever more complex, ever more miraculous manifestations of life. 

Life and death are propelled forward by a force that arises from the very stuff of existence. Physical matter itself – long before it became life – was already shaped by a self-organizing principle. Something within the most basic building blocks of the universe compels them to create order out of chaos. Something in the dance of atoms and the spinning of the stars. Something that we try to make sense of in the language of physics and chemistry and biology, as ever more complex interactions build upon each other, until life itself emerges.

“Emergence. Something more from nothing but. Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances,” the scientist says. (Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, p. 28) 

* * *

There is something that moves the universe, and everything in it, from nothing to something. This something binds us together, each and all. Something which, as we spin faster and faster in the dance of life and death and more life, keeps us from flying apart.

Some religious people call this “God.” “The word, “God,” is a symbol. It’s an arrow pointing toward a reality invested at the heart of our being,” Forrest Church says. 

“God doesn’t throw babies out third-story windows or cause tsunamis. God is that which is greater than all and yet present in each. When that which is present in you relates to that which is present in all, you are sustained. You are billowed on the ocean of divinity and made safe. There’s great safety in being a part of, rather than being apart from, the ground of your being.” (p. 172)

Another word often used interchangeably with God is love. “Love never dies,” Church writes, 

“I’m not certain about life after death. I know, however, that love is immortal, that every act of love we perform in this life extends like a little [chain] of pearls. It’s carried on into one life and then passed on into another, so that centuries from now, not named with our name nor signed with our signature, but initiated by us and borne by our heirs, our love lives on. That’s the work of religion. The work of religion is to make sure that the love we spread carries further than the division and hate.” (p. 176)

* * *

Life and death are two sides of the same coin. They are partners in the same dance. What holds them together, and what propels them forward is a mystery. A mystery at the very heart of existence, at the very heart of creation. A mystery that moves us and sustains us. A mystery I call love.

Love – as beautiful and powerful as it is – cannot save us from the pain of loss. It works just the opposite way. The more deeply we love, the more deeply we will grieve. The depth of our sadness is in direct proportion to past gladness.

This is part of what it means to live well. As Mary Oliver says, you need to do three things: 

- love what is mortal;

- hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;

- and, when the time comes to let it go, …let it go.

May we firmly embrace everything life and death have to offer us.

And may we be unafraid to love.

Amen.

The Making of a Citizen

"It is not always the same thing to be a good [person] and a good citizen."
-- Aristotle

Reading: by Robert Fulghum from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, from a piece entitled “Term Limits” (p 152-155)

“Notice: Your citizenship has expired.”

What? Yes! Term limits for citizens. Why not? This term-limits thing is still a good idea. If it is true that elected officials get corrupted if they stay in office too long, maybe it’s the same for us who hold the political office of citizen. Let’s at least set tough standards for all incumbents, citizens included.

Suppose that every twelve years our terms expired. Before we could requalify as citizens, our records in office would be judged. Remember, most of us got something for nothing the first time just by showing up here at birth. Now we have to qualify…

I say: Tough standards for all elected and non-elected officials of government. 

Suppose that every twelve years we lose our perks and privileges of office. We reapply, submit our record as citizens, get examined, tested, and checked out for competency, and pay our fees. If we pass, we get a citizen’s license, stamped with big red letters saying: “USE IT OR LOSE IT.”

If we flunk, we’ll be given mercy and sent back for retraining in history, law, and civic responsibility. We’ll be allowed two more chances to pass muster.

However. Recall our latest standards: Three strikes, and you’re out.

Reading: by Teresa Palomo Acosta from a poem entitled “Crossing ‘a piece of earth’”

At the border the gatekeepers sit with loaded guns.

Just this side of it I look at the brand newest official government map

For directions to a US/Mexico round trip.

Though I know that the map cannot measure precisely

The lay of the land.

Now changed by the brand newest migra laws.

They have altered our conscious excursions to each side

And our ownership or land/rights.

At the border 

Where the guards with guns are stationed

I begin to reconsider 

The rules I have relied upon

To cross the borders

That divide earth from earth

On the same terrain.

How can I redefine one slice of the land

Turned into a flat treadmill

Of personal causes that stretch over its bridges:

Day labor, drug dealer, simple family outings/

Trading one form of persecution for another?

Reading: from an article entitled “Citizenship” that appeared in the children’s magazine “Scholastic News” last month (from Scholastic News: My Weekly Reader, Sep 2013)

How to be a good citizen:

We are good citizens, don’t you agree?

We care for our whole community.

Sometimes we lose at the games we share.

We still have fun. We play fair.

There’s one way to act that is always correct.

Treat other people with lots of respect.

To be a good citizen, keep this in mind:

Whatever you do, always be kind.

The Making of a Citizen

A Sermon Delivered on October 20, 2013

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

So tell me. How many voting members are in the U.S. House of Representatives? (435) Tell me, who are four authors of the Federalist Papers? (… You know, those 85 essays published in New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788, when New York State was deciding whether or not to support the U.S. Constitution.) They are, of course, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Publius.

And, of course, you know the five things for which Benjamin Franklin is famous: he was a U.S. diplomat, the oldest member of the Constitutional Convention, the first Postmaster General of the United States, the author of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” and the one who started the first free libraries. (As trivia item six, I should mention that we count him as one of our Unitarian forebears.)

These are some of the questions immigrants need to answer, if they want to become U.S. citizens. One hundred potential questions are listed in this handy booklet, “Learn about the United States,” published by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. This is what you will be tested on at your naturalization interview. Though to be fair, I should tell you, you only need to know one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, and only one thing Benjamin Franklin is famous for.

And some questions are easier than others. For instance, “What is the capital of the United States?” and “What’s the name of the ocean off the East Coast?” I imagine few us of would have trouble with those.

I know these things, because on a beautiful Wednesday morning this summer I drove up to Chicago, to the offices of the Department of Homeland Security, and took my civics test. I am happy to say I passed. And any day now I should be receiving a notice telling me where and when I can join an Oath Ceremony, at which point – if all goes well – I will become a bone fide American citizen. 

At the interview in Chicago, I promised that I was not and had never been a member of a communist, Nazi, or terrorist organization. I promised that I would defend this country’s constitution and laws against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I promised that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law. (Though in Germany, when I was eighteen, I applied for CO status.)

As you may know, I was born in Germany. And up to this point in my life I have been a German citizen. After my oath ceremony I will have dual citizenship in both countries.

I look forward to that moment, because my status as resident alien here has felt increasingly awkward in recent years, partially because the climate for non-citizens has become increasingly strained, especially after 9/11. Immigration policies have become more restrictive and enforcement more aggressive.

I also look forward to being a citizen here, because for years I have felt as if I were living a lie. Because I am fair-skinned and speak fluent English, I have been able to pass as a native, even though I am actually an alien. Other immigrants are less fortunate.

* * *

October is Immigration Justice Month. A local group called the “CU Immigration Forum” and its Faith Allies have been offering educational and inspirational events throughout the month designed to raise our awareness on issues surrounding immigration and the immigrant experience. For instance, next Sunday, October 27, there will be an Immigration Justice Fair at University Place Christian Church, at the corner of Springfield and Wright, followed by an interfaith worship service at 2:00 p.m..

Our members Pat Nolan and Claire Szoke have been actively involved. Last Monday evening we hosted a film screening and discussion here. The film was a documentary about a massive raid conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in Postville, Iowa in 2008. The Postville Raid is considered the largest and most brutal immigration raid in U.S. history.

And on Thursday evening, October 31, we will be hosting an interactive presentation entitled “Our View From the Border.” Two desert aid workers will be offering firsthand accounts of trends in migration and their efforts to help. The speakers are from a group called “No More Deaths,” which was founded by the UU Church in Tucson, Arizona.

Across the country and for several years now, Unitarian Universalists have joined together to challenge unjust immigration policies and practices. At our General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky last June, delegates from UU congregations across the country  adopted a Statement of Conscience, taking a position on “Immigration as a Moral Issue.”

In the statement, we acknowledge that all nations have a right and obligation to enact immigration laws for the well-being of their citizens. Some of our laws are moral and humane, and contribute to the public good. Unfortunately, there are others that “use race, class, religion, ethnicity, ability, or sexual orientation to dictate who belongs and who does not.”  “Our challenge as religious people is to distinguish the moral from the immoral, supporting the former and opposing the latter.”

* * *

The realities of life for millions of documented and undocumented immigrants in this country are hair-raising. Families are torn apart, others live in constant fear of deportation. Some parents don’t dare take their children to school, for fear they might be arrested. Others are victims of violence, but are afraid to call the police. Desperate men and women die in the deserts on the Mexican-American border, thousands are imprisoned for months in for-profit detention centers and are denied basic civil and human rights.

Millions of hard-working men and women are treated as less than human, often living in a kind of legal limbo, stuck somewhere in an immigration system that is deeply flawed. And they are victims of a political and social climate that incorrectly labels them as “illegals,” or “criminals,” or “terrorists.” 

A moral immigration system would provide a clear path to legal residency and citizenship. It would provide work visas that ensure worker protection, and access to medical care and education. It would provide due process under the law and alternatives to detention. It would provide safety and support.

* * *

Immigration, emigration, migration – the movement of people between countries and continents is a timeless human phenomenon. Whether in search of economic advantage, whether to flee religious or political persecution, whether forced by famine or warfare – humans have always been on the move. 

America is known as a nation of immigrants. But actually the entire family of humanity is made up of immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

It is no coincidence that the world’s great religious traditions all include passages that ask us to tend to the needs of the foreigner, the traveler, the stranger. The Hebrew scriptures say you should love the foreigner, because “you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.” (Lev. 19-33-34). In the Christian scriptures, when Jesus is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he responds by telling the story of the Good Samaritan – a foreigner, traveling in a foreign land, who helps a man who had been badly beaten. And the Qur’an says, we should do “good to …those in need, neighbors who are near, neighbors who are strangers, the companion by your side, the wayfarer that you meet” (4:36).

We are all citizens of some country. But more basically than that, and more often than not, we are all foreigners. There are over 190 nations in the world – 193 member states of the United Nations. According to that count, most of us are citizens in one country, and foreigners in 192. And even dual citizens are still strangers in 191 nations. 

* * *

The theologian Paul Tillich points out that one of the oldest stories of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions is the story of Abraham. God says to Abraham, “Go from your home… to the land that I will show you.” Abraham is asked to leave his native soil, the community of his family, the faith of his fathers, his people and state, for the sake of a promise he does not understand. The God who asks obedience of him,” Tillich writes, “is the God of an alien country, a God not bound to the local soil... who means to bless all the races of the earth.” 

This God says: “[You] must ever leave [your] own country and enter into a land that will be shown to [you]. [You] must trust a promise that is utterly transcendent.”

Leaving our native land and entering an alien country is not only an integral part of our human history and religious past, it is not only a matter of moving across geographic and national boundaries. It is also a universal aspect of human experience, accessible to each of us. As Tillich puts it: 

“The path into an alien country may also signify something wholly personal and inward: parting from accepted lines of belief and thought; pushing beyond the limits of the obvious; radical questioning that opens up the new and uncharted… It [may be a] temporal, not geographical, emigration. The alien land lies in the future, the country “beyond the present.” And when we speak of this alien country we also point to our recognition that even what is nearest and most familiar to us contains elements of strangeness…” (On the Boundary: An Autobiographical Sketch, p. 92) 

When we are home, we live within the boundaries of what seems safe, secure, and familiar. The religious life asks us to move out of our comfort zone. It asks us to heed the voice that arises from deep within our hearts, the voice that beckons us to live more fully, more courageously, more compassionately. 

The religious life asks us to leave our native land behind, and dare to search for a promised land. A land of milk and honey. A land of abundance, where justice flows down like water, and peace like an ever-flowing stream.

Sometimes the obstacles we have to overcome seem insurmountable. The boundaries designed to keep us safe and secure become borders that divide us, guarded by gatekeepers with loaded guns. Borders that divide earth from earth, person from person. Borders that divide us into separate groups: citizens and strangers. And the only choice we seem to have is whether we want to trade one kind of persecution for another.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better.

* * *

It was Socrates, who – two and a half thousands of years ago – said, “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” I don’t know whether he was the first to imagine what it might mean to be, not a citizen of a particular nation, city or state, but a citizen of the world. He certainly wasn’t the last.

Five hundred years ago, Francis Bacon wrote, “the parts and signs of goodness are many.” If we are gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows that we are citizens of the world.  It shows that our “heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.”

* * *

I think that Robert Fulghum is onto something, when he suggests we re-apply for citizenship, again and again. That we re-submit our records, get examined, tested and checked out for competency. Being a good citizen is not a matter of passing a one-time test. It is about being good, every day. And when we discover we are falling short of our ideals, we take a breath, maybe we say “sorry,” and try to make amends. And we resolve to do better. 

This is not rocket science. Even child knows what it means to be good:

There’s one way to act that is always correct.

Treat other people with lots of respect.

To be a good citizen, keep this in mind:

Whatever you do, always be kind.

All people are citizens and deserve our respect. And every one of us is a stranger, searching for a promised land. God, Yahweh, Allah, the Spirit of Life and Love – calls us to envision a better world. We are called to move beyond boundaries that might divide us, join hand to hand, and together do whatever we can to make our vision a reality.

So be it. Amen.

Doing the Right Thing

"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is within your own eye?" -- Gospel of Matthew

Meditation:  by Bill Holm a poem entitled “New Religion”

This morning no sound but the loud

breathing of the sea. Suppose that under

all that salt water lived the god

that humans have spent ten thousand years

trawling the heavens for.

We caught the wrong metaphor.

Real space is wet and underneath,

the church of shark and whale and cod.

The noise of those vast lungs

exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.

Heaven's not up but down, and hell

is to evaporate in air. Salvation,

to drown and breathe

forever with the sea.

Reading: by the sociologist Christian Smith from Moral Believing Animals. (This passage was quoted in the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt.) Here he tells a story, the story of Western society as told from the liberal progressive perspective. 

Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and irrational traditionalism… But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist, welfare societies. While modern social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth dedicating one’s life to achieving.

Reading: by the clinical psychologist Drew Westen from The Political Brain. (This passage was also quoted in the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt,) Here he offers the story of Western society as told in the socially conservative speeches of Ronald Reagan:

Once upon a time, America was a shining beacon. Then liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted our traditional American values and opposed God and faith at every step of the way…. Instead of requiring that people work for a living, they siphoned money from hardworking Americans and gave it to Cadillac-driving drug addicts and welfare queens. Instead of punishing criminals, they tried to “understand” them. Instead of worrying about the victims of crime, they worried about the rights of criminals…. Instead of adhering to traditional American values of family, fidelity, and personal responsibility, they preached promiscuity, premarital sex, and the gay lifestyle… and they encouraged a feminist agenda that undermined traditional family roles… Instead of projecting strength to those who would do evil around the world, they cut military budgets, disrespected our soldiers in uniform, burned our flag, and chose negotiation and multilateralism… Then Americans decided to take their country back from those who sought to undermine it.

Reading: A Story from China: “The Missing Axe” (from Favorite Folktales from Around the World, edited by Jane Yolen, p.412) 

[Once upon a time, a] man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his axe while he was digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.

Doing the Right Thing

A Sermon Delivered on October 6, 2013

By

The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann

Those of you who come to church regularly and who have heard me preach in the past know that I try to offer a balanced and reasonable perspective from the pulpit. When addressing controversial issues, I try to acknowledge both sides of any argument. 

For me, this is more than a rhetorical device. It is expression of faith. I don’t believe humanity can be neatly divided into opposing factions: those who are right, and those who are wrong, those who are evil and those who are good.  

Unitarian Universalists say, we affirm the “inherent worth and dignity of every person.” This idea is a modern rendition of a much older religious notion – the notion that we are all God’s children. All human beings, men and women, black, brown, red, yellow, white, gay and straight, young and old, conservative and liberal – all of us are made in God’s image. Each of us carries a seed of divinity within, the world-soul exists within the individual-soul, Buddha nature is an integral aspect of human nature. 

God loves all of us. And every single one of us, from the day we are born, long to be loved. Each of us wants to be treated kindly and fairly. Every one of us is endowed with an instinct for kindness, and justice, and love.

This profound religious idea, which exists in all the world’s great religious teachings, found particular expression in the words of our Universalist forebears. Historically, you recall, Universalists preached universal salvation. They said that because God is good and because God is love, none of us will be condemned to eternal hell-fire. 

In the 1700s, hell-fire and damnation was the message preached from most Christian pulpits. People, at the time, thought the threat of damnation was an important way to persuade believers to lead morally upright lives. Without the fear of hell, the reasoning went, people would have no incentive to resist their sinful urges. Without the fear of hell, society would succumb to anarchy and immorality.

Our Universalist ancestors respectfully disagreed. They said that humans, in their deepest being, long to do good. Our very existence is an expression of love. Human happiness is most reliably found when we do the right thing. 

My faith is grounded in the conviction that deep down each of us and all of us want to serve a common good. That’s why I am a big believer in the value cooperation and compromise. That’s what I preach from the pulpit. That’s what I believe. 

* * *

But I have to tell you – sometimes I have a hard time practicing what I preach. Especially in a week like this, when the government itself has been shut down because of irreconcilable differences between our two political parties.

How is cooperation or compromise conceivable when the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, says we are locked in an epic battle? He claims he doesn’t want this battle. He says, “The American people don’t want their government shut down, and neither do I.”

But the Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, dismisses the Republicans’ proposed resolutions as “kid’s stuff,” “one cockamamie, can’t-pass idea after another.” Reid accuses Boehner of being dragged around by a tribe of rogue “banana Republicans.”

And president Obama says he will not negotiate.

And while our political leaders are stuck in a stalemate, hundreds of thousands of federal worker aren’t being paid. Half of all civilian military workers, that’s 400,000 people, were furloughed. Nine out of ten Internal Revenue Service employees, over 85,000 men and women, were told to stay home. More than half of the people working for the Department of Health and Human services, over 40,000 people, are not being paid.

A good portion of the stalemate hinges on so-called Obamacare, a duly passed law that Democrats and the president staunchly support, for the sake of millions of American who need health care. The same law that a Republican representative from Indiana condemns as “one of the most insidious laws known to man.”

The shutdown is costing the still shaky US economy a billion dollars a day in lost wages for federal workers. But according to experts, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. The total economic impact is easily ten times bigger.

The entire country, it seems, is irreconcilably divided. Each side blaming the other for the trouble we are in. Each side digging in its heals, refusing to budge. And truth be told – I am not immune to this dynamic. I myself see one of our political parties as right, and the other as wrong. I look at the news, and clearly see who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And I blame the bad guys.

* * *

Two weeks ago Dave Sharpe, the chair of our board of trustees, talked about how church is a team sport. It’s a metaphor he found described in a book by the same title. According to the metaphor, the minister of a church is the coach. Other program staff, like our Director of Religious Education and our planned Membership Coordinator, are assistant coaches. And our committee leaders are trainers, who organize our activities. But all of us are players. (After the service today, over a cup of coffee or tea, I hope you check out the displays in fellowship hall. Ideally the information will help you figure out which position you would like to play.)

Jonathan Haidt uses the same “team metaphor” to describe an essential aspect of religion. In a chapter entitled “Religion Is a Team Sport,” he writes, “a college football game is a superb analogy for religion.” Like religion, “college football is an extravagant, costly, wasteful, institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims (including the players themselves, plus the many fans who suffer alcohol-related injuries).” From a sociological perspective, a rousing football game does just what a religious rite is supposed to do: it flips a switch in people’s minds that makes them feel, for a few hours, that the are not isolated individuals, but “simply a part of a whole.” 

Jonathan Haidt has a word for the sense of community created in such gathering that often involves thousands upon thousands of fans at tailgate parties, with lots of eating and drinking, and socializing and mingling leading up to the game, which then morphs into routines of massive chanting and cheering and singing. He calls it a “hive” mentality. The college rituals surrounding football games flip a “hive” switch in students’ minds, which ideally makes them feel deeply connected to the school, strengthening the school spirit, and ideally attracting better students and alumni support.

Like college football games, “religions are social facts.” Religion cannot be understood as a phenomenon among lone individuals any more than hivishness can be understood by observing a single bee. 

Sometimes we may imagine that religion is above all concerned with what each of us believe about God, the universe, heaven and hell. Some of us hold beliefs that are scientifically sound. For others they involve supernatural scenarios - angels and demons and miracle healings.

But more important than our individual beliefs is the role religion plays both in strengthening the bonds of community and deepening our moral sensibilities. 

Jonathan Haidt writes, 

“If you think about religion as a set of beliefs about supernatural agents, you’re bound to misunderstand it…  But if you [consider the insights of sociology and evolutionary theory] you get a very different picture. You see that religious practices have been binding our ancestors into groups for tens of thousands of years. That binding usually involves some blinding – once a person, a book, or principle is declared sacred, then devotees can no longer question it or think clearly about it.” (p. 317)

The stories we tell deepen our sense of community. They describe what it is we hold sacred. Our stories provide the framework for our sense of meaning and morality. They teach us right and wrong.

The stories we tell to make sense of our lives are not created in a vacuum. They are shaped by the stories we heard when we were children, the stories our elders told – whether fairy tales or family lore, or political morality tales that involved “evil empires,” or the discovery of our own God-given continent, a Promised Land for the Pilgrims. Or maybe stories about human progress and perfection, and a free and just society based on the self-evident truth that all men and women are created equal.

The stories we tell are expressions of the ideology we embrace. But we don’t simply embrace whatever stories and ideologies surround us. We don’t simply soak up the ideas of our environment. Some of us are genetically and neurologically inclined to enjoy novelty and diversity. Others are more sensitive to perceived threats and dangers. Thus we tend to gravitate toward those stories and life narratives that resonate with us. 

Intuitively and unconsciously we are drawn to the grand narratives of either the left or the right. Once we join a religious or political team we get caught up in its moral matrix. We see confirmation of our own grand narrative everywhere, and it’s difficult – almost impossible – for someone outside our moral matrix to convince us that we are wrong. It is almost impossible for us to see from outside our own particular moral point of view. 

From our vantage point – when we lose our axe, and watch our neighbor’s son go by, we can’t help but see him walk like a thief, look like a thief, and speak like a thief. And no matter what the boy says, it will sound like the words of a liar and a cheat. It will sound like someone, stubbornly digging in his heals, unwilling to budge, unwilling to take responsibility for his actions and errors.

Liberals often think moral persuasion is a matter of making a rational argument. As if we arrive at our sense of right and wrong through our powers of reason. But in fact our moral sensibilities are buried much deeper in our psyche than our intellectual ability to engage in critical thought. Our moral sense is a gut-level instinct. 

Research has shown that when confronted with moral dilemmas, we make our decisions in the blink of an eye. Our moral intuitions arise instantaneously within us. We immediately have a feeling of what is right and what is wrong. Coming up with reasons for our decisions is a much slower process. Our moral arguments, more often than not, are justifications we struggle to come up with after the fact. 

Morality both binds and blinds us, Jonathan Haidt writes. “It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.” (p. 366)

This is a tragedy, because we need more than one perspective in order to overcome the challenges that confront us. We need both liberals and conservatives. Haidt imagines them as yin and yang – two energies at work in the world that stand in stark contrast, and both of which are needed, each of which needs to be continually checked and balanced by the other. As John Stuart Mill put it, both are “necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

If we allow our differences to divide us, we will all lose. As Lao-Tzu wrote in the Tao te Ching: 

There is no worse disaster than misunderstanding your enemy;
To do so endangers all of [our] treasures;
So when two well matched forces oppose each other,
The [one] who maintains compassion will win.

Compassion is difficult when we feel so clearly right, and others seem so clearly wrong. And yet compassion is the path of religion at its best.

This is what the great Universalist preacher Hosea Ballou meant when he said, “If we agree in love, there is no disagreement that can do us any injury, but if we do not, no other agreement can do us any good. Let us endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace.”

May all our efforts to confront wrong 

And to do right

Be guided by the spirit of love.

Amen.