Sunday, December 12, 2004
”Perfect Presence” - December 12, 2004
We gather in the chill of winter solstice, finding warmth from each other,
nourishing hope where reason fails.
Grateful for small miracles, we rejoice in the wonder of light and
darkness and the daring of hope.
Holy one of Blessing, Your presence fills creation.
You have kept us alive, You have sustained us, You have brought us to
this moment.
This morning I want to share with you how difficult it is being perfect.
Most of you will probably agree that I hide it pretty well. You may not
even have been aware of my perfection. But now its out in the open. It is
a terrible burden to always know the right answer, and to always remain
poised at all times - non anxious presence, we clergy types call it.
Sometimes it is even necessary to fake some flaw in my personality or
demeanor, even dare I say, my diction in an oral presentation. I might
mispronounce a word, use the uneducated accent of my rural New England
roots, or even use improper grammar, can you believe, in order to perpetrate
a ruse on you my unsuspecting parishioners - so, for instance, if I say
idear and not idea, then you know. I am trying to protect you. After all,
even the one whose birthday we are about to celebrate said the only perfect
one was his Father who he clearly stated was living, if not out of state,
then at least in another state, and certainly not very accessible. Yet some
of us seem to believe we have nearly achieved that lofty status. Did you
know I always remain patient with every rental group that I have contact
with? Without perfection this would not be possible. Just ask anyone who
saw me, should I say heard me, warmly greet the person who was honking at
me to get my car out of her way in the circle out front of the church the
day of Faire on the Square. It was a shining example of the perfect use of
preacher’s lungs.
Perfect presence. There is a bit of simple play on words there. At this
time of year many of us seem to develop this agonizing feeling that the
gifts we have purchased for our loved ones are simply not the perfect
presents we had hoped to see them joyfully unwrap on Christmas day. The
genesis of this sermon was the seemingly endless list of Christmas gifts our
6, 8, and 10 year old children have come up with this year. Every new flyer
from the store or television commercial generated additional ideas, which
might be fine, because they surely would never receive every item on a very
long list anyway. Unfortunately, the problem has been that the new items
have gone successively to the top of the list on what seems like a daily
basis. The implication has been that if they did not receive the new, most
desired item then Christmas would not be a very joyous occasion. This has led
to much angst on the part of the recipients of these lists, the brokers
between the children and the purveyor, Mr. Claus. So Andrea and I would make
some purchases thinking we had just what they wanted, and then new desires
would be made known. We thought, “they’ll never be happy, and Christmas
will degenerate into a day of shattered hopes and a deluge of tears.”
Whatever happened to the satisfied, relatively certain ethos of one major desired
item making it a perfect Christmas - like the baseball mitt I once requested
in October, which I expected delivery on two months later with much
assuredness. I still have it. Haven’t these kids ever heard of one simple,
stable request. So how to give them a perfect Christmas when the perfect
seems to keep changing or perhaps can simply not be achieved? All the
effort to make them happy for the holiday, to say nothing of the financial
commitment, increases the desire that it be a good Christmas or else. We
can make a bottomless commitment to making them happy, and still fear a day
of dashed hopes. As Christmas approaches I sometimes feel like the mother I
overheard at the Imax theater the other day. It was an early release day
from school, and we had taken our kids to see the Polar Express in 3-D. As
we waited for the movie to start, I heard the woman behind me ask her kids,
“Well, are you excited yet.? Huh, are you excited?” Before the youngster had
a chance to answer, the mother said, “Well you better be. I just paid $100
for these tickets, and you will enjoy the show.” Nothing like forced
happiness, or was it perfection with a price tag. Remember when we used to
laugh about the toddler who played with box, while the untouched perfect
gift sat in the corner?
What is it about the greatest holiday of the year that induces us to
reflect pervasively on what we can do to create perfect lives for ourselves
or our children? Is it that if we have everything or have that one thing we
want the most, we will be happy. Maybe we think, life will be perfect with
the right toys. That may sound absurd and unattainable, but when we set
ourselves up to give the perfect gift to our children, the one thing in all
the world that will make them happy, or be the person who satisfies the
other and never fails the other then we see how difficult it is to be
perfect. Impossible, in fact. While perfection may not be a word we use very
frequently, the feelings of failure and guilt and shame that we frequently
have are what give flesh to this unspoken desire to be all and provide all
to our children, our parents, or our loved ones. We have a feeling that we
are disappointing them if we do not conform to their requests. We may
think their life is hard or they didn’t get what they hoped for, and now
they are unhappy. Why couldn’t I have given them that one thing they
wanted? My failure shows how far from perfection I am. The holidays
exacerbate this because we are seeing more people, giving more gifts,
involved in more meals and it sets up that many more opportunities for
competition and the judgment of success or failure. Our desire for
perfection as gift givers or parents or family member comes from our own
high expectations, or the perceived expectations of others. We can’t meet
those standards, and thus feelings of failure arise.
The desire for human perfection comes directly from our religious faith.
The spiritual founder of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing said
that the purpose of our faith is to awaken within us aspirations after a
nobler character and higher existence. In fact, he said the design of preaching and
the gospel of ministry was nothing less than the perfection of the human
character. Channing said we have all the capacities to aid in the pursuit of
perfection. But if religion is suppose to ennoble us in this striving, what
is wrong? Does it set our ideals too high? Are we looking for perfection in
all the wrong places? Channing said we have the ability to make unlimited
progress in moral and intellectual excellence. So, if we have this power,
why are we so easily derailed?
Sometimes perceived perfection is not really so. Many of you know that I
have an older son, who is now 25 years old. Oftentimes when we see a
newborn baby we hear people say that the baby is simply perfect in every way
- the rosy skin, the warm, cuddly, cooing little life with wide open eyes
for the world. We often say that the birth at Christmas time symbolizes the
hopes and dreams we all place in the life of a child for all the tomorrows
of the world we live in. Even morally the baby is unsullied and pure as the
world lies before them, ready to be known and understood, and they are the
perfect blank recipients for all its knowledge and beauty. I say this not
to balance the new purity with what we now know about the genetic map each
of us has that may bring problems and heartaches and disease. This does
reflect less than perfection, but I say it in this context today to recall
a memory of an apparently perfect little baby who was born 25 years ago. An
apparently perfect one who swallowed some infected amniotic fluid and was
rushed to a neonatal intensive care unit, for it was feared that these
poisons would poison him, and possibly end this new life. Instead of joy
and happiness at the birth of my first child, I was terrified. This big,
strapping perfect looking child, who was not perceptively sick like the
other babies in the unit was not perfect. I knew right away that perfection
was not possible.
Each of us grows into the world with varying skills and talents which are
nurtured in our environments to greater or lesser degrees. Some of us are
successful economically, some of us are handsome or beautiful, some of us
are smart and some are caring. We have gifts we develop, gifts we use to
greater or lesser degrees. But no matter how we develop no one ever is that
perfect person I presented at the outset of the sermon. I am reading a
biography of Abraham Lincoln, called Redeemer President. Lincoln may be the
redeemer because he saved our nation, but he also believed not that our
nation is favored by God, but that it is our mission is to determine
what God favors for our nation. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon thought Lincoln was
“as near a perfect man as God generally makes.” He said this because
Lincoln possessed “unlimited integrity, always telling the exact truth, and
always doing the honest thing at all times and under all circumstances.”
Yet this perfect man was not very social or spontaneous in his feelings, and
moreover while he enjoyed life rapturously, still he was the victim of
terrible melancholy. This perfect man also had a deep streak of despair,
worthlessness and disappointment. We know he had marital difficulties, he
suffered the loss of a child, and he sometimes felt less than perfect in his
profession because he never earned a law degree, but was instead
self-taught.
While Lincoln would never have accepted the word perfect to describe
himself, there was a person in our Unitarian tradition who clearly felt
driven to strive for perfection. This was Margaret Fuller, who despite her
female sex was driven first by her father, and later by herself to be the
smartest, most erudite person in the world. Her father had her mastering
language after language, philosophy and science, and then on to polite arts
like piano, drawing, singing and handwriting. Did she ever sleep? In the
meantime he dreamed that she wouldn’t be able to play the piano in true
time, and voiced his doubts to his wife. As a result she practiced the
lesson for two days continuously. ”Father will think I make no progress,”
she said. Pleasing her father became an obsession. She began to worry
whether she was witty or entertaining enough, and then about the quality of
her letters to him. “I have a very bad pen,” she wrote, ”and hope you will
not criticize my writing too severely.” Later she wrote, “I fear I have
often pained you . . . I will endeavor to gratify all your wishes.” Here
we have a case of a woman who could never be perfect enough in her father’s
eyes. The reward may well have been that she was the smartest , most gifted
person in the world, and a great conversationalist to boot. But her drive
for perfection ruined her health, and she suffered with horrible migraines
her whole life, and she was so sure of her perfection that she often implied
that to others. They frequently didn’t like her, but it has always been
hard for a smart, confident woman to be liked in society whether she thinks
she is perfect or not. It is a thin line between self-love and
self-loathing. Those who are most sure of their perfection are often the
furthest from it, and their loathing underneath might be treated with a
generous dose of self-acceptance.
Famous figures in history remind us that there are no perfect people.
Sometimes there is silence among us because of shame about our status or
feelings of competition with others. The season entices us to buy when we
cannot afford to, or we find our values out of step with what seems to be
the predominant culture. If we have children they clamor for the same things
their friends have. The story I shared today speaks to many of these
feelings we have, especially at holiday time. The farmer and his son are
trying to bring their donkey to market to sell. Each group they encounter
find some reason why they are stupid, inadequate or are taking the wrong
approach. They feel that pressure from others, and so they put down the
donkey they are carrying. Then the son gets up and rides, and the people say
he is uncaring by making the old man walk, and then the next groups thinks the
opposite. Finally they both ride together, but the people feel this abuses
the donkey. In their final feeling of shame, the donkey runs off and they
lose her. The endless cycle of worrying about doing the right thing, or how
others think of us, or trying to please everybody ends us with the family
being empty handed. Christmas time makes us vulnerable to the opinions and
impressions of others, and we need all of our inner resolve to make our own
decisions about what is best for us. It is a time when our inner voice of
what is right must come to the fore.
This seems like the perfect Unitarian Universalist response, trust
yourself. Don’t listen to those other voices at holiday time. Unfortunately
we need those other voices to share our stories of family struggle or
inadequacy, or financial fears with. The profound religious thinker Thomas
Merton says that when we live for others, we are able to face and accept our
own limitations. But isn’t this the Christmas problem we have been talking
about? Its those others who broadcast or remind us of our limitations. But
Merton goes on to say, “As long as we secretly adore ourselves,” that is
think we are perfect, “our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with
an apparent defilement.” When you live for yourself, and think you have all
the answers, you fail to see your humanness. But Merton says when you live
for others, “We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all
have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a
most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need
others and others need us.” Merton says that we begin to see that both our
success and our failures are part of an organic whole. My success may help
another, or my failures may have been caused by another. Even a mistake may
be compensated for by another. No one is perfect, and we only move forward
on each others backs.
This is a significant part of the power of the Christmas message. Every
baby is us, and we come to earth needing others to care for us and nurture
us. In some ways we are like Gods, marvelously endowed, prefect and
beautiful, but we are also subject to disease and death and hatred, and we
have the freedom to make bad choices, choices that hurt ourselves and
others. I think Charles Dickens’ famous story, “A Christmas Carol” has value
here. You know it as a story of a mean old skinflint, who is redeemed and
becomes a generous philanthropist who knows how to give the perfect gift.
But I want you to think of what Scrooge was like before he was redeemed. He
worried about his business, and told his employee he must work long
hours. He looked into the ghosts of his past, and feared the grave. He is
terribly human in his inadequacies, but what he does is admit those fears.
He does not go on convinced of his rich perfection above all others, but
secretly very vulnerable. Instead he takes the risk of confronting his human
frailty. He takes the risk of encountering how much he needs others. His
problem is that he has to make the decision to be brave. The religious
experience is not that he is transformed to be a nice generous guy, but that he
takes the scary journey of encountering all his fears about life. Once he
takes that fearful journey of admitting his fears of loneliness and
alienation, then he is ready to be a true, loving generous human being who
lives not for himself, but for others.
The idea of perfection, of perfect presence, exists in religion to
remind us that none of us are there - not most beautiful or smartest. We
all have trees with missing branches, jellies that don’t jell, and children
who are ungrateful for those perfect gifts. In faith, perfection is always a
vision, an ideal, a goal. Working towards that vision is what gives meaning and
hope to life. The perfect is not here now, and even when something you greatly desired occurs, it will not be the panacea for your life. When the Israelites, received their greatest desire, and returned to Jerusalem after the exile, the prophet Isaiah reminds us they learned that resentment and fear and family problems were still present in their lives.
Even the return from exile didn’t make everything perfect. So what we will sing
as a closing hymn, which comes from Isaiah 61 is only a vision of the
prophet - being together n religious community, we can only work towards the
time when the oil of gladness will dissolve all mourning, and together we
will build a land where all the captives - all of us who are captured by
loneliness, by fears about money or illness, consumed by pride and vanity,
will one day go free, and as the prophet knew long ago, we will only do that
together, as a community, living for others.
When the song of angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the brothers (and sisters)
to make music in the heart.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
”The Christian Curse” - December 5, 2004
We believe in a fellowship that shall unite men and women and children, not in the bonds of Buddhist, or Muslim or Christian love, but in the holier bonds of human love;
Going down, beneath all that divides us, to the principles of freedom and understanding; Below religions to religion; beneath all the sacraments to the universal impulse that bends the soul in reverence and awe; . . . a union not of religious systems, but of free souls, united to build on the basis of truth, justice and love, the commonwealth of humankind.
Readings - ”The Peaceful Shepherd” by Robert Frost
”Out Like a Lamb” by Andre Dubus
I was shifting nervously in my seat. I had already been at church for more than two hours. I had listened to my apparent century old Sunday School teacher try to convince us that Noah’s Ark, that implausible boat that held all the animals was preserved for eons, and now sat on the peak of Mt Ararat in Turkey. I was also required to attend adult church, and this day I had managed to exhaust all of my mother’s hard candy supply, and the end of the church service was nowhere in sight. In addition to a twenty minute harangue about how I should be prepared for the Second Coming, this was one of those Sundays where the pastor and deacons had decided some of us were ripe for an altar call. You know, we were asked to give ourselves over to Jesus, and “come on down,” that is go up front before everybody and say, yes, I do believe, just like the Cowardly Lion repeated in my favorite movie, “I do, I do, I do.” Well, my particular family was never given over to public displays of faith, and so no one ever got up. Yet I always looked nervously around on such occasions at my parents, and thought, please don’t embarrass me. What I reveled in was the commentary over dinner later, when the characters of those who did go up front were maligned. Phrases like drunken barfly or cheatin’ deadbeat were bandied about. Well, it was true that Jesus seemed to like all the sinners. You can look it up in those Gospels.
This was the Christianity I grew up with and left. This was the Christianity later immortalized by the words, “born again.” You can summarize the message of evangelical Christianity in four words: Jesus Christ saves sinners. “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” The heart of the Bible for these Christians was John 3:16. I still have it memorized after all these years. ”For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Evangelicalism plainly says you cannot be reconciled to God unless you confess your sin, and receive new life in Christ through the holy spirit.
This faith at its best, historian Mark Noll says, is an offensive religion, especially so in our modern multicultural, pluralistic world. We are offended by it because it says plainly you can only know God, understand the world or be a good person if you have been saved by Jesus. Once upon a time these Christians were only concerned about personal salvation. They did not enter politics, but increasingly they have become concerned about things like school systems teaching a perceived atheistic theory of evolution. Their children, they felt, were being corrupted by the immoral teachings and values of liberal America. And so evangelicals entered American political life in earnest to change school curricula and elect representatives who were anti-abortion, anti-gay and downright intolerant at home and abroad. Some pundits have said, that in this last election, these evangelicals voted their beliefs in the heartland of red America, which on some maps has been labeled Jesusland.
The genesis of this sermon topic was a request by Jean Merkl to fulfill last year’s service auction commitment. Jean, if I understand her correctly has asked me to discuss just what it means to be a Christian these days. Well, that is a very good question, and unfortunately not an easy one to answer. It has never been clear what it means to be a Christian because there have always been competing viewpoints for the exclusive rights to the label. The early Christians, as many writers like Elaine Pagels have argued, developed conflicting viewpoints about who Jesus was. Among these differing views some emphasized his human nature and not the divine. At first it was a faith that was intended only for Jews, and not the Gentiles. Nothing was certain at all about Christianity until the year 325, when Emperor Constantine thought it should be standardized and codified. Centuries later reform movements developed within the Catholic church, culminating in the Protestant Reformation. While Luther was the first to accuse the Catholics of corruption and immorality, 350 separate groups eventually joined the first protesters, including our own Unitarian ancestors in Poland and Transylvania. In all of Protestantism, the emphasis was upon individual faith and the Bible rather than a institutional faith and the church hierarchy.
The problem with most of these versions of Christianity is each one believed itself to be the true and original faith, because each was arrived at by following Luther’s instruction to read the Bible for oneself. In the 1560’s, about forty years after Luther nailed up his 95 complaints, some of these Bible readers proclaimed another new version of the truth, but it was different from the others in significant ways. A preacher named Francis David in Transylvania concluded that Jesus never intended people to worship him like a God, and declared that the best way to be Christian was to follow Jesus, or emulate him because he was human just like you or me. This preacher also said that different expressions of Christian truth should each be respected and allowed to coexist, and subsequently his king, who just happened to have converted to Unitarianism, issued the first edict of toleration in history. So here was another new interpretation of Christianity which emphasized a human Jesus, ethical living and understanding of others. But the eternal problem was who had the one right absolute version of Christianity?
This question continued to percolate in the new world. While our Puritan ancestors thought the Anglicans had too much Popery, not to be confused with sweet smelling potpourri, and said simplify and get rid of all stained glass, symbols, prayer books, and that foul smelling incense, their faith was grounded entirely in a direct, intense evangelical, experience of God which was intensely intolerant, especially of those who in the 1700’s began to place their faith experience on a slow, educational growth of the spirit that was expressed through one’s good works in the world. Those who emphasized improving this world rather than waiting for signs from the hereafter were the nascent Unitarians. They wanted a purely ethical Christianity that was marked by a broad Christian church that placed no emphasis on doctrine or dogma, but on teachings that could help everyone lead moral lives. We might say that they were a living embodiment of the old hymn which summarized faith with these words: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Was Christianity expressed through works as the Unitarians said, or was it expressed through faith as the evangelical Calvinists said? The Unitarians wanted a broad based religion that could include everybody, but the Calvinists said, no, you heretics do not belong in our Christian community. Get out. We had to be tolerant, ethical Christians by ourselves. This began another round of debate that almost immediately began to plague us Unitarians internally. It is what I have called the Christian curse in my sermon title.
What this curse refers to is that we have spent far too much time and energy over the last 200 years arguing about whether we are Christian or not. Certainly our roots are in Christianity and Protestantism, and there is a classic Unitarian Universalist position that affirms a liberal Christian understanding of a benevolent God, human beings who are inherently good not sinful, a human Jesus and salvation for all and condemnation of none. Some Unitarian Universalists feel we should maintain our relationship to Christianity because it is our tradition and our culture. We are about to unabashedly celebrate Christmas. Even if we do change the words of hymns and mention Hanukkah or solstice in passing, our central passion is elsewhere. Some say we cannot let those who live in Jesusland take the Christian name without a fight from those who have another viewpoint. Some say we can communicate with other Christians more if we are part of the larger fold, even if we occupy a small liberal fringe.
To those who wonder, it is true that our tradition is Christian, and so in that sense we are Christians, but as Emerson and Theodore Parker pointed out 150 years ago, tradition is merely that, and is often something that should be outgrown. Parker ignited a fire storm within the denomination when he said things like Bibles and churches, and even men named Jesus are transient truths, and the only permanents truths are things that Jesus taught like love and understanding. Forms and systems that we have developed are meaningless beside a direct experience of pure religion. Parker was accused of destroying Christianity, but what he was doing was saying we need to pay attention to deeper truths beneath the words and rituals. Perhaps a more critical question is whether those who call themselves Christians are expressing those deeper religious truths. We should call them to account not by trying to reclaim Christianity, but by exposing the emperor who has no clothes.
They are no Christians if they want to make us into helpless sheep. This is the reason I struggled with Christianity as a child. Like Andre Dubus, my church had this big portrait of the white Anglo-Saxon Jesus holding the little lamb. He was the shepherd who was protecting the innocent creatures of the world, like me. Sounds good at first, but as Dubus points out the real analogy is that we are stupid sheep who need to be fenced in, and would escape and kill ourselves if we were not protected and watched all the time. Being characterized as ignorant and therefore unable to think for myself, puts me back in the Garden of Eden story. I like Adam and Eve have gained knowledge of good and evil, or otherwise I would still be trapped in the Garden with the sheep, and the notion of a religion or a God who knows what best for me. This is totally at odds with our liberal faith. While the sheep pen Christians would have us embrace a seven day creation story as good science, we have always argued that the more you learn about the world the better able you will be to understand it and make moral choices in it. The other day I was looking at a new biography of Josiah Wedgewood, the English Unitarian who is known to us all for his famous chinaware. Scanning the book, I saw where it described his grandfather as having a Unitarian faith where reading became the religious substitute for Christian prayer. I thought how appropriate, where others pray for a miraculous solution, or try to place the responsibility for action elsewhere, we have always said never accept something on faith alone. Unlike the sheep who must stay within the defined parameters or else, our approach to religion is do all you can to understand an issue and then do your best to transform the world. It seems to me that Christianity should open your mind, rather than shut it in.
They are no Christians if they want to destroy the other. Now it is one thing to be ignorant and helpless, or even a sinner, but the impulse to actually see others as defective and worthy of your scorn or your destructive impulses is worse. Now we all know that Christianity has a long history in this regard. Robert Frost in his poem The Peaceful Shepherd lists what has really governed in our lives, and it has not been that peaceful shepherd who was depicted on the church parlor walls. Instead Frost says, this governance by crown and scales and cross, may have well as been a sword. Of course it has often been said that that is exactly how Islam expanded, by the sword. It seems to me that while Christianity was often domesticated, it has also had its share of sword wielding conquerors. When you have the truth, and you believe that is the sole truth that will save the world, then your obligation is convince others by whatever means necessary that they too need to embrace that truth. Frost concludes that the cross of faith is hardly worth renewal in his new heaven, and we might add, especially as world wide fundamentalism becomes more widespread. In the New York Times, Gary Wills pointed out a frightening similarity between our Islamic terrorist enemies and the Christian triumphalists here, who declare that our God is better than theirs, and that modernity has destroyed us, and therefore we must destroy all our enemies. It seems to me the founder of Christianity said love your enemies rather than destroy them.
They are no Christians if they say one thing and do another. The marketing slogan of the Methodist church is Open hearts, Open minds and Open doors. This sounds like the kind of Christianity even we could embrace. We believe in minds that search for new knowledge. We want doors that are open to different religious perspectives so that while we have passion for our own perspective, we respect other viewpoints. And finally, open hearts so that we would speak the truth about our lives and live it according to those words. This means there is a yearning to prevent all manner of hypocrisy, so if we pretend to speak with moral authority that we love all children, then by our words and actions we do everything we can to prevent their abuse, even if it means exposing centuries old systems of power and privilege and control. Right? So how does one, in the case of the Methodists, reconcile a faith that says we are open to all with hearts, minds and doors, if you then hold a heresy trial for one of your clergy, and find her guilty of practices incompatible with Christian teaching? On December 2, the Rev. Beth Stroud, lost all her ministerial credentials in Pennsylvania for being a clergyperson who is a lesbian in a committed relationship. Is her very person incompatible with Christianity, or is it that those who are in loving committed relationships cannot be Christians? This certainly makes you wonder just what is compatible with Christianity? Would you like to be excluded from your faith and your profession because you love somebody? Is it exclusion and abuse, or is it love and understanding? Hypocrisy must end so that all these Christians in name only can open their hearts with integrity and honesty, like Beth Stroud has done, in her relationships with her partner and others.
Emerson once wrote, “What a distortion did his (Jesus) doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages. What does it mean to be a Christian? I recall the brief, revelatory statement that the only Christian died on the cross. Mostly we liberals are not considered Christians because we do not and never will accept Jesus as Lord and savior, and even now are a pluralistic faith that draws on all the religions of the world for its meaning and sustenance. My view, like our opening words, is that if this is your religious home, you are not Buddhist, Muslim or Christian, you are Unitarian Universalist, a fellowship that seeks to bind people together in holier and deeper bonds than the limits of one faith. Former UUA President, Robert West once wrote, “No theology or cherished church doctrine has a monopoly on kindness and friendship and hope, on joy and the opening of the human heart. No theology or cherished church doctrine has a monopoly on human response to the marvelous existence in which we live and to the people with whom we live on this whirling planet. No theology or church doctrine has a monopoly on ideals and aspirations.” What does it mean to be a Christian? Kieerkagaard once wrote “We never become a Christian, we are always in the process of becoming.” I would hope that all of us, whether we use the word Christian or not, would follow that path of becoming. In Christianity it is a striving towards loving one’s neighbors as oneself, where closing the mind, excluding others or personal hypocrisy are not reflective of this desire to be whole. The real question is what are you becoming as a person. When we go beneath labels to a deeper human trust in each other, we are living pure religion, that binding of wounded hearts together by that which is eternal in all. This is what Theodore Parker wanted Christians to be all along. It may yet be the salvation of the world’s differences.
Real Christianity gives new life. It makes us outgrow any form, or any system of doctrines we have devised, and approach still closer to the truth. It would lead us to take what help we can find. It would make the Bible our servant, not our master. It would make us revere the holy words spoken by “godly humans of old,” but revere still more the word of God spoken through Conscience, Reason and Faith, as the holiest of all.
”Perfect Presence” - December 12, 2004
Rev. Mark Harris
Opening Words - from Hanukkah Lights by Congregation Beth El
We gather in the chill of winter solstice, finding warmth from each other,
nourishing hope where reason fails.
Grateful for small miracles, we rejoice in the wonder of light and
darkness and the daring of hope.
Holy one of Blessing, Your presence fills creation.
You have kept us alive, You have sustained us, You have brought us to
this moment.
Reading - ”The Father, the Son and the Donkey” Buddhist and Aesop
Sermon - ”Perfect Presence”
This morning I want to share with you how difficult it is being perfect.
Most of you will probably agree that I hide it pretty well. You may not
even have been aware of my perfection. But now its out in the open. It is
a terrible burden to always know the right answer, and to always remain
poised at all times - non anxious presence, we clergy types call it.
Sometimes it is even necessary to fake some flaw in my personality or
demeanor, even dare I say, my diction in an oral presentation. I might
mispronounce a word, use the uneducated accent of my rural New England
roots, or even use improper grammar, can you believe, in order to perpetrate
a ruse on you my unsuspecting parishioners - so, for instance, if I say
idear and not idea, then you know. I am trying to protect you. After all,
even the one whose birthday we are about to celebrate said the only perfect
one was his Father who he clearly stated was living, if not out of state,
then at least in another state, and certainly not very accessible. Yet some
of us seem to believe we have nearly achieved that lofty status. Did you
know I always remain patient with every rental group that I have contact
with? Without perfection this would not be possible. Just ask anyone who
saw me, should I say heard me, warmly greet the person who was honking at
me to get my car out of her way in the circle out front of the church the
day of Faire on the Square. It was a shining example of the perfect use of
preacher’s lungs.
Perfect presence. There is a bit of simple play on words there. At this
time of year many of us seem to develop this agonizing feeling that the
gifts we have purchased for our loved ones are simply not the perfect
presents we had hoped to see them joyfully unwrap on Christmas day. The
genesis of this sermon was the seemingly endless list of Christmas gifts our
6, 8, and 10 year old children have come up with this year. Every new flyer
from the store or television commercial generated additional ideas, which
might be fine, because they surely would never receive every item on a very
long list anyway. Unfortunately, the problem has been that the new items
have gone successively to the top of the list on what seems like a daily
basis. The implication has been that if they did not receive the new, most
desired item then Christmas would not be a very joyous occasion. This has led
to much angst on the part of the recipients of these lists, the brokers
between the children and the purveyor, Mr. Claus. So Andrea and I would make
some purchases thinking we had just what they wanted, and then new desires
would be made known. We thought, “they’ll never be happy, and Christmas
will degenerate into a day of shattered hopes and a deluge of tears.”
Whatever happened to the satisfied, relatively certain ethos of one major desired
item making it a perfect Christmas - like the baseball mitt I once requested
in October, which I expected delivery on two months later with much
assuredness. I still have it. Haven’t these kids ever heard of one simple,
stable request. So how to give them a perfect Christmas when the perfect
seems to keep changing or perhaps can simply not be achieved? All the
effort to make them happy for the holiday, to say nothing of the financial
commitment, increases the desire that it be a good Christmas or else. We
can make a bottomless commitment to making them happy, and still fear a day
of dashed hopes. As Christmas approaches I sometimes feel like the mother I
overheard at the Imax theater the other day. It was an early release day
from school, and we had taken our kids to see the Polar Express in 3-D. As
we waited for the movie to start, I heard the woman behind me ask her kids,
“Well, are you excited yet.? Huh, are you excited?” Before the youngster had
a chance to answer, the mother said, “Well you better be. I just paid $100
for these tickets, and you will enjoy the show.” Nothing like forced
happiness, or was it perfection with a price tag. Remember when we used to
laugh about the toddler who played with box, while the untouched perfect
gift sat in the corner?
What is it about the greatest holiday of the year that induces us to
reflect pervasively on what we can do to create perfect lives for ourselves
or our children? Is it that if we have everything or have that one thing we
want the most, we will be happy. Maybe we think, life will be perfect with
the right toys. That may sound absurd and unattainable, but when we set
ourselves up to give the perfect gift to our children, the one thing in all
the world that will make them happy, or be the person who satisfies the
other and never fails the other then we see how difficult it is to be
perfect. Impossible, in fact. While perfection may not be a word we use very
frequently, the feelings of failure and guilt and shame that we frequently
have are what give flesh to this unspoken desire to be all and provide all
to our children, our parents, or our loved ones. We have a feeling that we
are disappointing them if we do not conform to their requests. We may
think their life is hard or they didn’t get what they hoped for, and now
they are unhappy. Why couldn’t I have given them that one thing they
wanted? My failure shows how far from perfection I am. The holidays
exacerbate this because we are seeing more people, giving more gifts,
involved in more meals and it sets up that many more opportunities for
competition and the judgment of success or failure. Our desire for
perfection as gift givers or parents or family member comes from our own
high expectations, or the perceived expectations of others. We can’t meet
those standards, and thus feelings of failure arise.
The desire for human perfection comes directly from our religious faith.
The spiritual founder of American Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing said
that the purpose of our faith is to awaken within us aspirations after a
nobler character and higher existence. In fact, he said the design of preaching and
the gospel of ministry was nothing less than the perfection of the human
character. Channing said we have all the capacities to aid in the pursuit of
perfection. But if religion is suppose to ennoble us in this striving, what
is wrong? Does it set our ideals too high? Are we looking for perfection in
all the wrong places? Channing said we have the ability to make unlimited
progress in moral and intellectual excellence. So, if we have this power,
why are we so easily derailed?
Sometimes perceived perfection is not really so. Many of you know that I
have an older son, who is now 25 years old. Oftentimes when we see a
newborn baby we hear people say that the baby is simply perfect in every way
- the rosy skin, the warm, cuddly, cooing little life with wide open eyes
for the world. We often say that the birth at Christmas time symbolizes the
hopes and dreams we all place in the life of a child for all the tomorrows
of the world we live in. Even morally the baby is unsullied and pure as the
world lies before them, ready to be known and understood, and they are the
perfect blank recipients for all its knowledge and beauty. I say this not
to balance the new purity with what we now know about the genetic map each
of us has that may bring problems and heartaches and disease. This does
reflect less than perfection, but I say it in this context today to recall
a memory of an apparently perfect little baby who was born 25 years ago. An
apparently perfect one who swallowed some infected amniotic fluid and was
rushed to a neonatal intensive care unit, for it was feared that these
poisons would poison him, and possibly end this new life. Instead of joy
and happiness at the birth of my first child, I was terrified. This big,
strapping perfect looking child, who was not perceptively sick like the
other babies in the unit was not perfect. I knew right away that perfection
was not possible.
Each of us grows into the world with varying skills and talents which are
nurtured in our environments to greater or lesser degrees. Some of us are
successful economically, some of us are handsome or beautiful, some of us
are smart and some are caring. We have gifts we develop, gifts we use to
greater or lesser degrees. But no matter how we develop no one ever is that
perfect person I presented at the outset of the sermon. I am reading a
biography of Abraham Lincoln, called Redeemer President. Lincoln may be the
redeemer because he saved our nation, but he also believed not that our
nation is favored by God, but that it is our mission is to determine
what God favors for our nation. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon thought Lincoln was
“as near a perfect man as God generally makes.” He said this because
Lincoln possessed “unlimited integrity, always telling the exact truth, and
always doing the honest thing at all times and under all circumstances.”
Yet this perfect man was not very social or spontaneous in his feelings, and
moreover while he enjoyed life rapturously, still he was the victim of
terrible melancholy. This perfect man also had a deep streak of despair,
worthlessness and disappointment. We know he had marital difficulties, he
suffered the loss of a child, and he sometimes felt less than perfect in his
profession because he never earned a law degree, but was instead
self-taught.
While Lincoln would never have accepted the word perfect to describe
himself, there was a person in our Unitarian tradition who clearly felt
driven to strive for perfection. This was Margaret Fuller, who despite her
female sex was driven first by her father, and later by herself to be the
smartest, most erudite person in the world. Her father had her mastering
language after language, philosophy and science, and then on to polite arts
like piano, drawing, singing and handwriting. Did she ever sleep? In the
meantime he dreamed that she wouldn’t be able to play the piano in true
time, and voiced his doubts to his wife. As a result she practiced the
lesson for two days continuously. ”Father will think I make no progress,”
she said. Pleasing her father became an obsession. She began to worry
whether she was witty or entertaining enough, and then about the quality of
her letters to him. “I have a very bad pen,” she wrote, ”and hope you will
not criticize my writing too severely.” Later she wrote, “I fear I have
often pained you . . . I will endeavor to gratify all your wishes.” Here
we have a case of a woman who could never be perfect enough in her father’s
eyes. The reward may well have been that she was the smartest , most gifted
person in the world, and a great conversationalist to boot. But her drive
for perfection ruined her health, and she suffered with horrible migraines
her whole life, and she was so sure of her perfection that she often implied
that to others. They frequently didn’t like her, but it has always been
hard for a smart, confident woman to be liked in society whether she thinks
she is perfect or not. It is a thin line between self-love and
self-loathing. Those who are most sure of their perfection are often the
furthest from it, and their loathing underneath might be treated with a
generous dose of self-acceptance.
Famous figures in history remind us that there are no perfect people.
Sometimes there is silence among us because of shame about our status or
feelings of competition with others. The season entices us to buy when we
cannot afford to, or we find our values out of step with what seems to be
the predominant culture. If we have children they clamor for the same things
their friends have. The story I shared today speaks to many of these
feelings we have, especially at holiday time. The farmer and his son are
trying to bring their donkey to market to sell. Each group they encounter
find some reason why they are stupid, inadequate or are taking the wrong
approach. They feel that pressure from others, and so they put down the
donkey they are carrying. Then the son gets up and rides, and the people say
he is uncaring by making the old man walk, and then the next groups thinks the
opposite. Finally they both ride together, but the people feel this abuses
the donkey. In their final feeling of shame, the donkey runs off and they
lose her. The endless cycle of worrying about doing the right thing, or how
others think of us, or trying to please everybody ends us with the family
being empty handed. Christmas time makes us vulnerable to the opinions and
impressions of others, and we need all of our inner resolve to make our own
decisions about what is best for us. It is a time when our inner voice of
what is right must come to the fore.
This seems like the perfect Unitarian Universalist response, trust
yourself. Don’t listen to those other voices at holiday time. Unfortunately
we need those other voices to share our stories of family struggle or
inadequacy, or financial fears with. The profound religious thinker Thomas
Merton says that when we live for others, we are able to face and accept our
own limitations. But isn’t this the Christmas problem we have been talking
about? Its those others who broadcast or remind us of our limitations. But
Merton goes on to say, “As long as we secretly adore ourselves,” that is
think we are perfect, “our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with
an apparent defilement.” When you live for yourself, and think you have all
the answers, you fail to see your humanness. But Merton says when you live
for others, “We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all
have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a
most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need
others and others need us.” Merton says that we begin to see that both our
success and our failures are part of an organic whole. My success may help
another, or my failures may have been caused by another. Even a mistake may
be compensated for by another. No one is perfect, and we only move forward
on each others backs.
This is a significant part of the power of the Christmas message. Every
baby is us, and we come to earth needing others to care for us and nurture
us. In some ways we are like Gods, marvelously endowed, prefect and
beautiful, but we are also subject to disease and death and hatred, and we
have the freedom to make bad choices, choices that hurt ourselves and
others. I think Charles Dickens’ famous story, “A Christmas Carol” has value
here. You know it as a story of a mean old skinflint, who is redeemed and
becomes a generous philanthropist who knows how to give the perfect gift.
But I want you to think of what Scrooge was like before he was redeemed. He
worried about his business, and told his employee he must work long
hours. He looked into the ghosts of his past, and feared the grave. He is
terribly human in his inadequacies, but what he does is admit those fears.
He does not go on convinced of his rich perfection above all others, but
secretly very vulnerable. Instead he takes the risk of confronting his human
frailty. He takes the risk of encountering how much he needs others. His
problem is that he has to make the decision to be brave. The religious
experience is not that he is transformed to be a nice generous guy, but that he
takes the scary journey of encountering all his fears about life. Once he
takes that fearful journey of admitting his fears of loneliness and
alienation, then he is ready to be a true, loving generous human being who
lives not for himself, but for others.
The idea of perfection, of perfect presence, exists in religion to
remind us that none of us are there - not most beautiful or smartest. We
all have trees with missing branches, jellies that don’t jell, and children
who are ungrateful for those perfect gifts. In faith, perfection is always a
vision, an ideal, a goal. Working towards that vision is what gives meaning and
hope to life. The perfect is not here now, and even when something you greatly desired occurs, it will not be the panacea for your life. When the Israelites, received their greatest desire, and returned to Jerusalem after the exile, the prophet Isaiah reminds us they learned that resentment and fear and family problems were still present in their lives.
Even the return from exile didn’t make everything perfect. So what we will sing
as a closing hymn, which comes from Isaiah 61 is only a vision of the
prophet - being together n religious community, we can only work towards the
time when the oil of gladness will dissolve all mourning, and together we
will build a land where all the captives - all of us who are captured by
loneliness, by fears about money or illness, consumed by pride and vanity,
will one day go free, and as the prophet knew long ago, we will only do that
together, as a community, living for others.
Closing Words - from Howard Thurman
When the song of angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the brothers (and sisters)
to make music in the heart.
”The Christian Curse” - December 5, 2004
Rev. Mark Harris
Opening Words - from Alfred Martin
We believe in a fellowship that shall unite men and women and children, not in the bonds of Buddhist, or Muslim or Christian love, but in the holier bonds of human love;
Going down, beneath all that divides us, to the principles of freedom and understanding; Below religions to religion; beneath all the sacraments to the universal impulse that bends the soul in reverence and awe; . . . a union not of religious systems, but of free souls, united to build on the basis of truth, justice and love, the commonwealth of humankind.
Readings - ”The Peaceful Shepherd” by Robert Frost
”Out Like a Lamb” by Andre Dubus
Sermon
I was shifting nervously in my seat. I had already been at church for more than two hours. I had listened to my apparent century old Sunday School teacher try to convince us that Noah’s Ark, that implausible boat that held all the animals was preserved for eons, and now sat on the peak of Mt Ararat in Turkey. I was also required to attend adult church, and this day I had managed to exhaust all of my mother’s hard candy supply, and the end of the church service was nowhere in sight. In addition to a twenty minute harangue about how I should be prepared for the Second Coming, this was one of those Sundays where the pastor and deacons had decided some of us were ripe for an altar call. You know, we were asked to give ourselves over to Jesus, and “come on down,” that is go up front before everybody and say, yes, I do believe, just like the Cowardly Lion repeated in my favorite movie, “I do, I do, I do.” Well, my particular family was never given over to public displays of faith, and so no one ever got up. Yet I always looked nervously around on such occasions at my parents, and thought, please don’t embarrass me. What I reveled in was the commentary over dinner later, when the characters of those who did go up front were maligned. Phrases like drunken barfly or cheatin’ deadbeat were bandied about. Well, it was true that Jesus seemed to like all the sinners. You can look it up in those Gospels.
This was the Christianity I grew up with and left. This was the Christianity later immortalized by the words, “born again.” You can summarize the message of evangelical Christianity in four words: Jesus Christ saves sinners. “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” The heart of the Bible for these Christians was John 3:16. I still have it memorized after all these years. ”For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Evangelicalism plainly says you cannot be reconciled to God unless you confess your sin, and receive new life in Christ through the holy spirit.
This faith at its best, historian Mark Noll says, is an offensive religion, especially so in our modern multicultural, pluralistic world. We are offended by it because it says plainly you can only know God, understand the world or be a good person if you have been saved by Jesus. Once upon a time these Christians were only concerned about personal salvation. They did not enter politics, but increasingly they have become concerned about things like school systems teaching a perceived atheistic theory of evolution. Their children, they felt, were being corrupted by the immoral teachings and values of liberal America. And so evangelicals entered American political life in earnest to change school curricula and elect representatives who were anti-abortion, anti-gay and downright intolerant at home and abroad. Some pundits have said, that in this last election, these evangelicals voted their beliefs in the heartland of red America, which on some maps has been labeled Jesusland.
The genesis of this sermon topic was a request by Jean Merkl to fulfill last year’s service auction commitment. Jean, if I understand her correctly has asked me to discuss just what it means to be a Christian these days. Well, that is a very good question, and unfortunately not an easy one to answer. It has never been clear what it means to be a Christian because there have always been competing viewpoints for the exclusive rights to the label. The early Christians, as many writers like Elaine Pagels have argued, developed conflicting viewpoints about who Jesus was. Among these differing views some emphasized his human nature and not the divine. At first it was a faith that was intended only for Jews, and not the Gentiles. Nothing was certain at all about Christianity until the year 325, when Emperor Constantine thought it should be standardized and codified. Centuries later reform movements developed within the Catholic church, culminating in the Protestant Reformation. While Luther was the first to accuse the Catholics of corruption and immorality, 350 separate groups eventually joined the first protesters, including our own Unitarian ancestors in Poland and Transylvania. In all of Protestantism, the emphasis was upon individual faith and the Bible rather than a institutional faith and the church hierarchy.
The problem with most of these versions of Christianity is each one believed itself to be the true and original faith, because each was arrived at by following Luther’s instruction to read the Bible for oneself. In the 1560’s, about forty years after Luther nailed up his 95 complaints, some of these Bible readers proclaimed another new version of the truth, but it was different from the others in significant ways. A preacher named Francis David in Transylvania concluded that Jesus never intended people to worship him like a God, and declared that the best way to be Christian was to follow Jesus, or emulate him because he was human just like you or me. This preacher also said that different expressions of Christian truth should each be respected and allowed to coexist, and subsequently his king, who just happened to have converted to Unitarianism, issued the first edict of toleration in history. So here was another new interpretation of Christianity which emphasized a human Jesus, ethical living and understanding of others. But the eternal problem was who had the one right absolute version of Christianity?
This question continued to percolate in the new world. While our Puritan ancestors thought the Anglicans had too much Popery, not to be confused with sweet smelling potpourri, and said simplify and get rid of all stained glass, symbols, prayer books, and that foul smelling incense, their faith was grounded entirely in a direct, intense evangelical, experience of God which was intensely intolerant, especially of those who in the 1700’s began to place their faith experience on a slow, educational growth of the spirit that was expressed through one’s good works in the world. Those who emphasized improving this world rather than waiting for signs from the hereafter were the nascent Unitarians. They wanted a purely ethical Christianity that was marked by a broad Christian church that placed no emphasis on doctrine or dogma, but on teachings that could help everyone lead moral lives. We might say that they were a living embodiment of the old hymn which summarized faith with these words: “They’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Was Christianity expressed through works as the Unitarians said, or was it expressed through faith as the evangelical Calvinists said? The Unitarians wanted a broad based religion that could include everybody, but the Calvinists said, no, you heretics do not belong in our Christian community. Get out. We had to be tolerant, ethical Christians by ourselves. This began another round of debate that almost immediately began to plague us Unitarians internally. It is what I have called the Christian curse in my sermon title.
What this curse refers to is that we have spent far too much time and energy over the last 200 years arguing about whether we are Christian or not. Certainly our roots are in Christianity and Protestantism, and there is a classic Unitarian Universalist position that affirms a liberal Christian understanding of a benevolent God, human beings who are inherently good not sinful, a human Jesus and salvation for all and condemnation of none. Some Unitarian Universalists feel we should maintain our relationship to Christianity because it is our tradition and our culture. We are about to unabashedly celebrate Christmas. Even if we do change the words of hymns and mention Hanukkah or solstice in passing, our central passion is elsewhere. Some say we cannot let those who live in Jesusland take the Christian name without a fight from those who have another viewpoint. Some say we can communicate with other Christians more if we are part of the larger fold, even if we occupy a small liberal fringe.
To those who wonder, it is true that our tradition is Christian, and so in that sense we are Christians, but as Emerson and Theodore Parker pointed out 150 years ago, tradition is merely that, and is often something that should be outgrown. Parker ignited a fire storm within the denomination when he said things like Bibles and churches, and even men named Jesus are transient truths, and the only permanents truths are things that Jesus taught like love and understanding. Forms and systems that we have developed are meaningless beside a direct experience of pure religion. Parker was accused of destroying Christianity, but what he was doing was saying we need to pay attention to deeper truths beneath the words and rituals. Perhaps a more critical question is whether those who call themselves Christians are expressing those deeper religious truths. We should call them to account not by trying to reclaim Christianity, but by exposing the emperor who has no clothes.
They are no Christians if they want to make us into helpless sheep. This is the reason I struggled with Christianity as a child. Like Andre Dubus, my church had this big portrait of the white Anglo-Saxon Jesus holding the little lamb. He was the shepherd who was protecting the innocent creatures of the world, like me. Sounds good at first, but as Dubus points out the real analogy is that we are stupid sheep who need to be fenced in, and would escape and kill ourselves if we were not protected and watched all the time. Being characterized as ignorant and therefore unable to think for myself, puts me back in the Garden of Eden story. I like Adam and Eve have gained knowledge of good and evil, or otherwise I would still be trapped in the Garden with the sheep, and the notion of a religion or a God who knows what best for me. This is totally at odds with our liberal faith. While the sheep pen Christians would have us embrace a seven day creation story as good science, we have always argued that the more you learn about the world the better able you will be to understand it and make moral choices in it. The other day I was looking at a new biography of Josiah Wedgewood, the English Unitarian who is known to us all for his famous chinaware. Scanning the book, I saw where it described his grandfather as having a Unitarian faith where reading became the religious substitute for Christian prayer. I thought how appropriate, where others pray for a miraculous solution, or try to place the responsibility for action elsewhere, we have always said never accept something on faith alone. Unlike the sheep who must stay within the defined parameters or else, our approach to religion is do all you can to understand an issue and then do your best to transform the world. It seems to me that Christianity should open your mind, rather than shut it in.
They are no Christians if they want to destroy the other. Now it is one thing to be ignorant and helpless, or even a sinner, but the impulse to actually see others as defective and worthy of your scorn or your destructive impulses is worse. Now we all know that Christianity has a long history in this regard. Robert Frost in his poem The Peaceful Shepherd lists what has really governed in our lives, and it has not been that peaceful shepherd who was depicted on the church parlor walls. Instead Frost says, this governance by crown and scales and cross, may have well as been a sword. Of course it has often been said that that is exactly how Islam expanded, by the sword. It seems to me that while Christianity was often domesticated, it has also had its share of sword wielding conquerors. When you have the truth, and you believe that is the sole truth that will save the world, then your obligation is convince others by whatever means necessary that they too need to embrace that truth. Frost concludes that the cross of faith is hardly worth renewal in his new heaven, and we might add, especially as world wide fundamentalism becomes more widespread. In the New York Times, Gary Wills pointed out a frightening similarity between our Islamic terrorist enemies and the Christian triumphalists here, who declare that our God is better than theirs, and that modernity has destroyed us, and therefore we must destroy all our enemies. It seems to me the founder of Christianity said love your enemies rather than destroy them.
They are no Christians if they say one thing and do another. The marketing slogan of the Methodist church is Open hearts, Open minds and Open doors. This sounds like the kind of Christianity even we could embrace. We believe in minds that search for new knowledge. We want doors that are open to different religious perspectives so that while we have passion for our own perspective, we respect other viewpoints. And finally, open hearts so that we would speak the truth about our lives and live it according to those words. This means there is a yearning to prevent all manner of hypocrisy, so if we pretend to speak with moral authority that we love all children, then by our words and actions we do everything we can to prevent their abuse, even if it means exposing centuries old systems of power and privilege and control. Right? So how does one, in the case of the Methodists, reconcile a faith that says we are open to all with hearts, minds and doors, if you then hold a heresy trial for one of your clergy, and find her guilty of practices incompatible with Christian teaching? On December 2, the Rev. Beth Stroud, lost all her ministerial credentials in Pennsylvania for being a clergyperson who is a lesbian in a committed relationship. Is her very person incompatible with Christianity, or is it that those who are in loving committed relationships cannot be Christians? This certainly makes you wonder just what is compatible with Christianity? Would you like to be excluded from your faith and your profession because you love somebody? Is it exclusion and abuse, or is it love and understanding? Hypocrisy must end so that all these Christians in name only can open their hearts with integrity and honesty, like Beth Stroud has done, in her relationships with her partner and others.
Emerson once wrote, “What a distortion did his (Jesus) doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages. What does it mean to be a Christian? I recall the brief, revelatory statement that the only Christian died on the cross. Mostly we liberals are not considered Christians because we do not and never will accept Jesus as Lord and savior, and even now are a pluralistic faith that draws on all the religions of the world for its meaning and sustenance. My view, like our opening words, is that if this is your religious home, you are not Buddhist, Muslim or Christian, you are Unitarian Universalist, a fellowship that seeks to bind people together in holier and deeper bonds than the limits of one faith. Former UUA President, Robert West once wrote, “No theology or cherished church doctrine has a monopoly on kindness and friendship and hope, on joy and the opening of the human heart. No theology or cherished church doctrine has a monopoly on human response to the marvelous existence in which we live and to the people with whom we live on this whirling planet. No theology or church doctrine has a monopoly on ideals and aspirations.” What does it mean to be a Christian? Kieerkagaard once wrote “We never become a Christian, we are always in the process of becoming.” I would hope that all of us, whether we use the word Christian or not, would follow that path of becoming. In Christianity it is a striving towards loving one’s neighbors as oneself, where closing the mind, excluding others or personal hypocrisy are not reflective of this desire to be whole. The real question is what are you becoming as a person. When we go beneath labels to a deeper human trust in each other, we are living pure religion, that binding of wounded hearts together by that which is eternal in all. This is what Theodore Parker wanted Christians to be all along. It may yet be the salvation of the world’s differences.
Closing Words - from Theodore Parker
Real Christianity gives new life. It makes us outgrow any form, or any system of doctrines we have devised, and approach still closer to the truth. It would lead us to take what help we can find. It would make the Bible our servant, not our master. It would make us revere the holy words spoken by “godly humans of old,” but revere still more the word of God spoken through Conscience, Reason and Faith, as the holiest of all.