The Answer Is Love

Rev. Douglas Taylor

August 25, 2024

Sermon Video https://youtu.be/lWxpvceWSEU

Love: such a soft and silly thing in the face of the hard, cruel reality of life. It can be rough, this life we are living. There is trouble, and we Unitarian Universalists hitch our wagon to Love, but is that really enough? Compared with things like apathy and violence and abuse and the corrupt use of power; love seems little and inconsequential. But listen to this poem by Daniel Ladinsky, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/14/fake-hafez-how-a-supreme-persian-poet-of-love-was-erased writing in the spirit of Persian poet Hafez. He writes:

I see violence; Hafez says ‘love.’

I see racism; Hafez says ‘hold hands.’

I see war and oppression; Hafez says ‘climb.’

I see cruelty and abuse and corruption of power; Hafez says ‘listen.’

I see apathy and greed and climate devastation; I see people taking sides against each other and anger circling; Hafez says ‘the terrain around here is far too dangerous for that.’

I see great need; Hafez says ‘don’t let go.’

Out

of a great need

we are all holding hands

and climbing. 

Not loving is a letting go. 

Listen,

the terrain around here

is

far too

dangerous

for

that.

“Not loving is a letting go.” Let’s talk a little more about we mean when we use the word Love like this. We Unitarian Universalists just offered a new articulation of ourselves in which we place the value of love at our center. We say “Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values.”

I need to spend just a minute here on this point before moving along with my larger message. We Unitarian Universalists can be a tricky lot to pin down. Unitarian Universalism grew out of the progressive wing of liberal protestant Christianity in America. But we are not exactly a Christian church any more. We expanded beyond those origins into a religion that has a lot of Christian protestant echoes, but very little of that original content.

We are a merged tradition. The Unitarian side of our lineage proclaimed ‘God is One’ in argument against the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Universalist side of our lineage declared ‘God is Love’ as grounds for a dispute against Hell and eternal damnation. But really, in both cases, the core theological message that has run as a fine thread through our now merged histories is less about the nature of God and Heaven, and more about what it means to be human.

As a faith community, we UUs do not focus ourselves on a creed or shared dogma, we have a breadth of beliefs gathered together here on Sunday morning. While we still have that protestant formula of meeting on Sunday morning for a sermon and hymns with a prayer and a passing of the collection plate – the content has shifted. The reading, for example, is not always – to be honest, not often – from scripture. Last week I preached about the moon and I didn’t double check but I don’t think I mentioned God or any passage from the bible during that sermon. But show up here on another Sunday and you’ll hear me say Jesus’ name more in twenty minutes than you’ll hear from this pulpit the rest of the year.

I remember reading Rick Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Church.” He talked about needing to focus a new church around a common purpose. He likened it to a radio station that had to select a genre of music. Would it be a country station or a hip-hop station? They couldn’t just play a random variety; people would stop listening. If you jumped from something new from Dua Lipa, and then played track 5 from Metallica’s Master of Puppets followed by a Bach concerto and then hit them with the latest Beyoncé – you would not have an audience. People would not come back to your radio station. Rick Warren argued, people would not come back to your church if you didn’t have a focusing genre of religion.

But that is almost exactly what we do here. We have a Neo-Pagen focused service on the goddess one Sunday and a celebration of Veganism the next. My plan for September, after the Drum circle Sunday, is to focus on water and brokenness on the 8^th, how to have a good argument with a friend on the 15^th, where are we with the war in Gaze on the 22^nd, and a Climate Revival on the 29^th. Each of which present an opportunity for me to quote from the bible or James Baldwin or maybe Metallica. (Probably not Metallica – I’m not actually versed in their lyrics.)

This is because we do not gather around a specific book or creed or person or experience of the holy. But what holds it all together? What is the thread of faith or belief that binds us as one community if it is not the bible or Buddha or a particular belief? We gather around a promise and a shared set of values. The quickest shorthand of those values and that promise is: Love.

We have pagans and humanists, Christians and atheists, Buddhists and Jews and agnostics, and many others – as well as a bunch of folks just uninterested in all the labels – and here we all are shoulder to shoulder on a Sunday morning listening to a message together. How do we do it? How do we come together as one faith? The answer is Love. A fresh articulation of our values says Love is the answer.

So, how does that work?

To use the framework from Rick Warren – our purpose as a Unitarian Universalist congregation is love; to embody an all-embracing love to the world. It always has been. While we have a new articulation of this – our new Values and Covenants statement (https://www.uua.org/beliefs) with Love at the center – this has been our center all along. Take a look at the graphic on the order of service. (Word Clouds from Hymnals by Rev. Dan Schatz)

Do you know about word clouds? It is an art graphics concept that takes words and puts them into a visual artistic form. The more often a word appears, the larger it is in the picture. A colleague took the digital online version of our grey hymnal and put it into a word cloud with this result. Our hymnal is arguably a fair representation and articulation of our Unitarian Universalist values. The grey hymnal was published in 1992, over 30 years ago. And love was at the center then.

I lift that up to show that while it is new to say “love is at the center;” it is not actually all that new to have love at the center for us. Or, as James Baldwin once said: “…love brought you here. If you trusted love this far, don’t panic now.”

Let me say a little about what I mean by the word ‘love’ in this context. Love can certainly be about romance and intimacy. That kind of love is better understood as an emotional experience, even chemical and hormonal. That’s not the kind of love we mean when we say love is at our center.

We are more accurately talking about love as Agape love according to the Greeks or Loving-kindness when you hear Buddhists reflect upon it. This is a kind of love that is less about emotions or ‘falling in love’ and more about a choice to see people in a certain light, to treat all people in a certain way not because they’ve earned it or because they are attractive to you – but simply because that’s the kind of person you are.

I want to drop another James Baldwin quote on you. Baldwin was a writer and civil rights activist who died in 1987. This past summer would have been James Baldwin’s 100’s birthday, (2024) on August 2. While I was tempted to do a sermon focused on Baldwin’s life and message, I decided instead that I will bring a Baldwin quote in my sermons at least once a month for the course of this coming year to honor his legacy and his message to American religion and life.

In his book, The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “I use the word ‘;pve’ here not in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universalist sense of quest and daring and growth.”

I, too, am using the word ‘love’ not in that personal sense. I want us to heard the word as a call into relationship and connection beyond just the romantic or intimate connotations. I want us to hear love as liberation. Or as Baldwin says “the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” Our promise as a faith tradition is grounded in this idea of love – of an all-embracing love. It is a love that opens us up, in which we become vulnerable. There is an element of risk, something that calls for trust.

It is easier to not be open. We risk when we love and we can be hurt. It takes a certain level of trust to be open, a trust that we can grow from the hard experiences, at trust that we can fail and still learn and grow together from the hard experiences. It is easier to not be open. It is easier to not put love at the center to not be so vulnerable.

What does it mean to say Love is the answer when we ask the questions amidst the war in Israel and Gaza, amidst climate devastation, amidst the dehumanizing rhetoric and legislation we hurl at each other. To say love is the answer, to put love at the center, means we keep pushing back and reconnecting with each other across the wounds and the heartbreak to really see each other.

It means we have made a choice to treat each other well even when we are hurting. It doesn’t mean we will abide injustice or stand by as we keep getting hurt or more vulnerable people keep getting hurt. Love does sometimes say ‘no.’ But in so doing, we continue to reflect our light to each other. We do it toward the liberation for all.

James Baldwin, again, has said, “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love – whether we call it friendship or family or romance – is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.”

Our world, our lives are too precious for anything less. That is what love calls us toward. I’m not saying we do it perfectly around here all the time – or even well enough most of the time. I’m saying that’s how we are called, that is the promise we hold when we put love at our center. 

Out

of a great need

we are all holding hands

and climbing. 

Not loving is a letting go. 

Listen,

the terrain around here

is

far too

dangerous

for

that.

In a world without end

May it be so.