Last Sunday we heard that there had been an earthquake in Sumatra and maybe 5000 people had died, then we hear of enormous plates of the earth's crust clashing beneath the ocean and of the tsunami that flattened cities across all of southern Asia, 80,000, 100,000, 150,000 died, 500,000 injured, many, many more still missing, and disease is on its way. These numbers are staggering, too large to grasp. These numbers are people, the suffering is more than we can bear to imagine. We wonder, "If I had been standing on the beach and seen the water recede would I have known enough to run? Would I have been drawn by curiosity toward the coming death? Would it have mattered if I had found shelter in a three story concrete building only to have it collapse around me and be swept away?

We make much of the insecurities of life since 9/11, but the threat of terrorists is minuscule compared to the devastation and death wrought by nature. All life ends in death, there is no escape; the question is how do we live the life that is given us. Do we live in fear or do we live in love?

From my point of view our best recourse is to find and create love, to reach out to those in need, to offer help and compassion to those whose lives or well being is endangered, to live our lives fully in the moment - not waiting for a better time, not striving to accumulate goods or status, but living our lives now, as though today were the last day we have to savor the air and those we love.

I hope to live by the words of three wise people:

Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, "I wish to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived. . ."

Rebecca Parker, the President of Starr King School for the Ministry, says it is our choice to "bless or curse the world." She writes, "The choice to bless the world is more than an act of will. It is an act of recognition, a grateful acknowledgment that in the midst of a broken world, unspeakable beauty, grace and mystery abide. There is an embrace of kindness that encompasses all of life, even yours. And while there is injustice, there moves a holy disturbance, a revolutionary love protesting, urging, insisting: That which is sacred will not be defiled. All who bless the world live their lives as a gesture of thanks for this beauty and this rage."

And Hillel, the wise Jewish Rabbi who wrote,

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?

In the face of tragedy may we choose to Bless the World, today. (Sydney K. Wilde)

Readings:

James Luther Adams – I Call That Church Free I call that church free which enters into covenant with the ultimate source of existence, That sustaining and transforming power not made with human hands. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claims to absolute truth or authority. This covenant is the charter and responsibility and joy of worship in the face of death as well as life. I call that church free which brings individuals into a caring, trusting fellowship, That protects and nourishes their integrity and spiritual freedom, that yearns to belong to the church universal. It is open to insight and conscience from every source; it bursts through rigid tradition, giving rise to new and living language, to new and broader fellowship. It is a pilgrim church, a servant church, on an adventure of the spirit. The goal is the prophethood and priesthood of all believers, the one for the liberty of prophesying, the other for the ministry of healing. It aims to find unity in diversity under the promptings of the spirit "that bloweth where it listeth... and maketh all things new."

Forrester Church – from the essay, Beyond Idolatry

Consider freedom. There is more than a semantic difference between religious liberalism and liberal religion. Are we liberals who happen to gather in churches, or religious people who practice our religion according to liberal principles? Religious liberalism places emphasis upon the substantive, liberalism, reducing religion to a mere adjective. When this happens, the dimensions of our faith become modifiers, secondary to an isolated precept, which when abstracted from the whole becomes an idol: the idol of “possessive individualism.”

Following the precedent of our nineteenth-century forbears, we Unitarian Universalists have come to trust and place great value on freedom and individualism. What we tend to forget is that they emphasized freedom in order to liberate themselves from bondage. Today our problem is not bondage, but bondlessness. Most of us are already free. We don’t need more freedom. We need the resolve to employ the freedom we have responsibly. We need to invest a little of our precious freedom, and bond ourselves to others in redemptive community.

Margaret Fuller – from Woman in the Nineteenth Century

I have urged on Woman independence of Man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in Woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.

I wish Woman to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not make an imperfect man her God, and thus sink into idolatry. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then, if she finds what she needs in Man embodied, she will know how to love, and be worthy of being loved.

Sermon: Freedom of Belief, and Then What? – Rev. Dennis Daniel

How do we determine whether something we have heard is true? A whole field of philosophy, known as epistemology, devotes itself to the question of how we know what we know, and I’m not very deeply read in it. But I got to thinking about how we recognize truth as I was working on the script for our performance of A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve. When Scrooge first sees the ghost of Jacob Marley, he is reluctant to believe his eyes and he engages in a sort of philosophical discourse with the Ghost – aware that his mind may create phantasms in response to stresses of various kinds, he speculates that the vision of the ghost may be due to a bit of undigested mutton or a bad reaction to mustard.

The ghost responds by lifting its head off its body and tucking it under its arm, while its voice continues to come from the head’s mouth, continuing their conversation. This is too much for Scrooge. (Too, much for me as well. I couldn’t figure out a way to make that happen without the aid of animation or special effects, so I left it out of the script.) But Scrooge was convinced. When the ghost asks again whether Scrooge believes that it is real, Scrooge replies, “Yes, I believe. I must.” But he still has his doubts. He doesn’t really accept the truth of Marley’s visitation until the first of the other spirits shows up at 1:00 am. It’s still possible that Scrooge was experiencing a chemical imbalance in his brain, buy in his understanding he had moved from intellectual arguing to existential dread. The ghost was as real as anyone would ever want a ghost to be.

To a greater or lesser extent, we all go through a process of discernment such as Scrooge’s as we try to figure out what makes enough sense for us to base our lives on it. We may not have to decide whether visions are real, but most of us are troubled throughout our lives by questions that haunt us. Some of those questions have to do with relationships. What is required of us? What can we hope for? How much of ourselves do we give away? And how much do we look to friends and partners to give away to us? How far should loyalty extend? And how far should privacy extend?

Some of our haunting questions have to do with how we choose to spend our lives. From what source to do we draw courage? Where does our integrity lie? Do we have a price, and what is it? What do we fear? How do we react to fear? How do we react to failure? To crisis? To loss? What unconscious drives affect the way we feel? The way we behave?

Then there are the questions that help us define our roles as citizens, neighbors, patriots, and members of the human family. What do we owe the larger world? What do we owe our parents? Our children? How do we express our solidarity with others? What are the limits of solidarity? How can we help change to things we think are harmful about our society? How do we protect ourselves from harm? What can we trust? Whom can we trust?

Whom can we trust? According to Joseph Hough, who was Dean of Faculty at my seminary, we’d better trust in God, because everything else we might be inclined to trust will eventually fail us. Friends, family, spouses, society and its institutions, the courts, the church, governments, at one time or another will all act in ways that are detrimental to our well-being. Only God can always be counted on. That statement made perfect sense to Dr. Hough. He had a deep prayer life which he described as listening rather than asking. Waiting and listening. You and I might say he was waiting for the wisdom of his years to make itself heard, or the wisdom of his unconscious, but Dr. Hough didn’t locate the source of that wisdom in himself. He needed for it to come from beyond himself, from God.

It was from Joe Hough that I learned how to pray for public gatherings. He opened every session of our class on The Church in Society by asking a student to lead us in prayer. I knew that my turn would come. I knew I needed to be ready, and I knew that I would have to be true to myself. I borrowed a phrase from Isaiah about our being a generation that was hard of heart and stiff of neck and prayed for clarity, understanding, openness to new truths, and the courage to follow through on what we were learning. It wasn’t spontaneous, nor was it as rhetorically elaborate as some of my classmates’ offerings, but it was sincere and it was straightforward. I have used that prayer, modified to fit the context, many times since.

In order to write the prayer I had to listen – to my intuition? To my inner voice? To God speaking through my inner voice? Whatever it was, the process worked and continues to work. I don’t inquire too deeply about the source.

For me, the concept of God has very specific meaning – God is that to which we listen when we pray, when we get out of our own way and allow the creative spirit to flow through us. God isn’t the being we address in our prayers, for that being has been shaped by our training and our expectations. That being is likely to be an idol, a thing of our own making. No, God for me is the being for whose voice I am a conduit, the voice that gave words to Isaiah, and to Amos and Hosea, as well as to Jesus and Paul, the voice that calls us beyond our present selves. God is a sort of catch-all explanation for whatever it is that reminds us to listen to our better impulses, follow our star, work for the common good, and move beyond our comfort zone in relating to strangers.

It’s because of that inner voice that this sermon is shaped the way it is. I don’t remember ever throwing away so many false starts. This is the sermon that wanted to be written. And supposedly it’s a sermon about the context of freedom, specifically the context of freedom of belief. My difficulty in approaching the topic probably came from my neglecting to listen and instead trying to force the argument to go places it didn’t want to go.

The stimulus for the topic came from Bucky McKeeman, Gordon McKeeman, one of the grand old men of our movement. When Sydney interviewed him for her doctoral project last year, he raised some basic theological questions about the direction that Unitarian Universalism was going. Before the merger of the two denominations 43 years ago, both Unitarianism and Universalism were based on doctrines, the firm belief that God was unified and singular, and the firm belief that as a loving parent, God would welcome all his children into paradise rather than condemn them to hell. When the two churches came together, they were unable to agree on doctrinal language that could satisfy both sides, so they settled on a compromise. Their central tenet would be freedom from doctrine. The consequence, said Bucky, is that in our freedom we have no belief at all. What good is freedom, he asked, if it leaves us ungrounded and directionless? Freedom doesn’t make sense by itself. It needs to serve a higher value.

To extend Bucky’s argument a bit, it seems to me that freedom of belief must necessarily mean freedom to make choices. Do you remember the scene in Huckleberry Finn in which Huck ponders what he should do about the slave Jim, who is traveling on the raft with him? Jim is someone’s property, as far as Huck understands, so if Huck helps him escape to Ohio, he will be abetting a kind of theft. Even more reprehensible, Jim intends to come back and steal his wife and child out of slavery as soon as he can. Huck is torn between his loyalty to Jim, who had just saved his life, and his fear that if he doesn’t turn Jim in, his soul will rot in hell. It’s a tough decision for a twelve year old boy with no theological sophistication.. In the end, Huck decides to take his chances with Jim. He won’t repay the man’s affections and loyalty by sending him back to slavery, even if it means he faces eternal damnation. “All right,” he says, “I’ll go to hell.”

We see two kinds of freedom in that episode, Jim’s hope of gaining freedom from slavery, and Huck’s freedom to listen to his inner voice and choose the higher value. He does so at what he anticipates will be great cost. Huck wasn’t pondering his freedom to believe, he was living it, acting on it. His theological understanding, his system of doctrine, if you will, was unchanged. He still believed that he was abetting a theft and that he would be punished for it. But his inner self knew that to betray a friend would be an even greater sin, one that he would punish himself for all his life.

We often have difficulty telling people what UUs believe, even what we personally believe. I think the difficulty comes from the fact that we are grappling with the wrong question. I came of age during the era of Values Clarification. Sid Simon’s work convincingly showed me that what I valued had to be reflected in what I did, how I spent my time, and how I used my money. I could say that I believed in living life to the fullest, but if I spent a significant part of every day playing computer games, I could offer little evidence that I had integrated by supposed value into my life.

In the same vein, James Luther Adams is famous for saying, don’t tell me about the God you worship. Let me live with you for a few weeks to see what makes you weep, what makes you angry, what gives you satisfaction, what guides your choices, and I’ll tell you about the God you worship.

You see, the important question is not, what do you believe, but what do you serve? How do you use your freedom? Do you worship an idol of your own making, or do your reflections, your decisions, your actions, serve the highest value you can grasp at a given time? What do you serve?

It’s a question I once put to a group of ministers with whom I was sharing a training program. I was the lone UU in the group. The others were all Christians of different flavors. For them the answer to my question was simple, so simple as to be facile. They served Jesus Christ. They had trouble understanding that my question merited any thought at all, let alone deep reflection. A question that would have been received by UUs as an invitation to introspection was short circuited for them by their belief system. I had to push them to tell me what their beliefs meant, what values Jesus represented for them, and how they saw their service in relation to those values. Although I didn’t have the language for it at the time, I was pushing them to listen to the voice that guided them, not to name it, but to hear it and act from it. But perhaps I was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, what do you serve, I should have asked, how do you serve? Having freely chosen Jesus as your Lord and Savior, having answered a call to Christian ministry, how do you serve? What do you do with your freedom? I put the same question to all who hear me today. What values does your freedom serve? Or in Rebecca Parker’s words, do you choose to bless the world?

Do you choose to bless the world?

Benediction

May we open ourselves ever move fully to that Eternal Mystery which lures us onward toward life and creativity. May we find the courage to live our faith, to speak our truth, and to strive together for a world where freedom abounds and justice truly does roll down like water. May we know the fullness of love without fear, and the serenity of peace without turmoil.

May we hold one another in the deep and tender places with compassion, and may we grace one another by sharing our own vulnerabilities, being ever mindful of the divinity within that makes soulmates of us all. – Carol Meyer