Sermons

The Practice of Presence
Rev. Douglas Taylor
1-7-07

I dropped my mom off yesterday with friends in Little Falls who will be caring for her for the next few weeks. They are likely on the road back to Boston as we speak.   My family and I have had a really wonderful time taking care of my mother during her visit with us these past few weeks.  She is more than halfway through her recovery time from the ankle surgery which is keeping her off her foot for so long.  She has needed help getting around.  She doesn’t need a lot of help, but the help she’s needed was indispensable!  I have fun with her because we talk shop together, what with us both being ministers.  We would slip into delightful conversations about the rhythms of church life, quantum physics and theology.  When she learned that I planned to preach this morning on “The Practice of Presence,” my mother offered me a meditation she had written some years back.  It begins with a story.  She writes,

Listen for a moment to the wisdom of a child.  The little girl was late coming home and explained to concerned parents that she had encountered her friend who had broken her favorite doll on the sidewalk.  “And you stopped to help her pick up the pieces?” her father asked.  “Oh, no,” she said, “I stopped and helped her cry.”

When we experience brokenness, we must cry.  But it is not easy to stop and cry.  At those times, we could use the help of a friend.  In small, sad, snatches of time we sit with one another comforting the pain into tears.  And in so doing, learn that the tears are healing waters.

Let us not turn away from the pain we know.  Let us not turn inward toward the pain with isolating fear.  Let us not stop up the tears in drowning pools.  Rather, let yourself be one who can cry with another.

It will not be to end the pain, but to bring comfort within the pain.  It will not be to repair the broken pieces, but to mourn them; to recognize their loss.

This will require of us the courage of our compassion and the conviction of our caring.  To cry with another is to stand before the hurt and recognize it for what it is and to acknowledge its place within our being.

May we each have the courage, the conviction and the capacity to cry with one another.

So Be It.

                                                            -The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth M. Strong,

And so, now I wish I had titled my sermon after one of the lines in her meditation: The Courage of Compassion, rather than the Practice of Presence.  It is compassion I wish to speak of most, and how it is an act of courage in many ways … I want to speak of that as well.  “Let us not turn away,” she writes.  “May we have the courage of compassion.”  Oh, presence is important, to be sure, that is the healing balm that people need from one anther in our world.  The practice of presence is powerful work that can change the world; we don’t see enough of it.  But perhaps that is because there is a deficiency of compassion just now.  Compassion leads us to be present.  Compassion leads us to notice what someone else is going through.  Compassion leads us to reach out.

And it seems, at times, that it does not happen enough.  It seems, at times, we need the courage of compassion because the world does not encourage such reaching out to occur.  The culture does not encourage such caring.  As if it is a radical act of resistance to care.

As I recall, a few months ago I warned you that to be a member of this congregation is to be a member of the community of resistance.  I mentioned that the grand purpose for which this and any other free church exists is to grow and to serve; to faithfully seek together to find and live out the ways of love; to be a community of resistance.  I remember saying we are not called to be respectable among the other religions; we are not called to be palatable or popular or within any proximity of prevailing opinion.  We are called upon to be radical, to be a community of resistance, to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.  I called each of us to stand up and be counted among those who are human in community.

Can you imagine the implications such a mission could have on the caring ministry of the congregation?  Perhaps, when I brought this up a few months ago you were able to see the repercussions such a commitment to resistance could have on our justice-making work together.  Perhaps you could see the consequences this could have for the Social Responsibility Committee – but the Caring Committee?  What would it matter to the Caring Committee that we declare ourselves to be a community of resistance?  Pastoral Care and Social Justice fit together better than most might think.  Our second Principle, for example calls us to promote “justice, equity, and compassion in human relations.”  Without compassion there can be no real justice.  Compassion rests at the heart of any worthy resistance!

There was a popular bumper sticker from a few years ago claiming that the most radical thing you can do is introduce people to each other.  We are a radical people with radical ideas of how to be a community of faith where all are welcome regardless differences in beliefs.  We are a radical people in a time when people are pushed into market niches and stereotypes.  Our faith calls us to break down such barriers every chance we can.  Unitarian Universalist theology will not accept the division of humanity into the saved and the unsaved, the good people and the evil people, those worthy of compassion and those unworthy of compassion.  We’re all in this together.

Back in the early 70’s, Henri Nouwen wrote a powerful book called The Wounded Healer.  The book quickly became a standard for pastoral theology.  The premise of the title is that “in our own woundedness we can become a source of life for others.”  The bulk of the book, however, is centered upon a critique of culture.  Nouwen said that we live in a dislocated world, a fragmented society, a rootless generation, and that we are a hopeless and lonely and isolated mix of people.  Nouwen said we are driven apart by forces in the culture.  Healing comes from a radical stance of hospitality, a welcoming in; it is a standing forth with all that you are and inviting others in.  The most radical thing you can do is introduce people to each other.  Or as J. M. Barrie put it: “Those who bring sunshine to others cannot keep it from themselves.”

It is interesting to note, however, that this isolation and dislocation is not the base human condition with which we must all suffer.  Certainly Unitarian Universalist theology does not suggest this to be the case, and neither does our biology.  Human biology is wired for empathy and caring.  Research lately has demonstrated that there are areas in the brain, in fact specific neurons, which are wired for compassion and empathy just like there are parts of the brain for moving your leg or thinking about ethics or remembering your social security number.

Mirror Neurons are the groundbreaking discovery in Social Neuroscience from the past few decades.  According to Wikapedia, the reputable online encyclopedia, “A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal performs an action and when the animal observes the same action performed by another animal. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself performing the action.”  In one early study they saw that this cluster of neurons fired when a monkey ripped a piece of paper and the same set of neurons fired when the monkey watched another monkey rip the piece of paper.

Mirror Neurons were first seen as a breakthrough in understanding linguistic development.  In humans, they have been found in the pre-motor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex of the brain.  In what is called Broca’s area, a language center in the brain, the mirror neurons are linked with imitative learning which is critical in language development, but also in nearly all forms of developments.  They are still studying these things, so there may not be an answer to this yet, but if researchers are calling mirror neurons Empathy Neurons, I wonder: do these neurons fire the same way in my brain when I cry and when I see someone else cry?

But I also wonder, is there something we do to kill these neurons off in ourselves?  Are we deadening ourselves to these mirror neurons?  Because so often the evidence demonstrates that people just don’t care!  Newspapers are filled with examples, the movies we watch and games we play for entertainment may also be contributing to the training of our mirror neurons to settle down and die.  “Desensitizing” was the concept from psychology, I wonder if biology will corroborate the story!

A few weeks ago I was sitting at the service department waiting room of the car dealer waiting for them to complete the several hundreds of dollars of work my car needed.  I was feeling surly, I was feeling grumpy, I was feeling out of sorts partly because I didn’t have several hundred dollars to spare and was trying to calculate where the money would come from and partly because I had planned to be on the road to Boston a few hours earlier to pick up my mom to bring her here for the holidays.  Suffice to say I was preoccupied, I was distracted, Nouwen’s word for it was dislocated.  I wasn’t feeling particularly pastoral or caring of others at that moment when one of the sales people walked past, nodded at me, and began making small talk.  I wasn’t interested.

Of course, I’ve never been interested in small talk.  I’ve heard many ministers describe a dislike or discomfort with small talk, so I don’t feel unique in this.  I do, however, remember a game we did during one of the Spirituality Retreats here at the church that reminded me of this.  The game was naming and describing your favorite things.  Each thing meant something about your self-perception: Three words describing your favorite animal were supposed to be three words describing how you see yourself, three words describing your favorite body of water were supposed to show how you are with intimate relationships.  So name your favorite fruit, and (this was slightly different) describe how you would eat it.  I chose a Kiwi fruit.  I would cut it in half and scoop out the middle.  (Yum!)  This is supposed to describe how you make friends.  Hmmm, not much room for small talk there: cut ‘em in half and scoop out the middle!

Anyway, I’ve learned how to make small talk, to chat, to schmooze!  I can do it.  But it’s work; it is not something that comes natural.  So, I was sitting in the customer waiting room and the salesman starts chatting with me: the weather, long hours, end of the work day.  I smiled; I made non-committal noises like, “Yeah,” and “Hmmm.”  As he walked away it occurred to me that he had made a comment about a pinched nerve that was bothering him.

I don’t know, but it sounded when he said it like it was another part of the small talk, and perhaps, for him, it was.  “It’s so warm, do you think it will snow before Christmas.  Whew, the day’s almost over.  My sciatica is killing me.  Hey, did you see the game last night?”  But I was grumpy and distracted and did not really hear him.  Maybe if I had been paying attention, maybe if I had been present to him he would have told me more: not so I could have made it all better, just so that he could have told someone what was going on.  Just so he could have known that someone else knew of his problem and cared.  But I don’t even know if it was just another comment in his small talk or if it really was bothering him.  I wasn’t paying attention.

I’d been reading about Buddhism and the experience of a great teacher who could pay attention to a student as if the student were the only one in the world as he or she asked a question.  I have had an experience like that – when a teacher gave me what felt like her undivided attention, her whole focus.  Suddenly the question I raised, the comment I offered became really important.  Someone was paying attention.  It was an intense experience, I remember this teacher as an intense person.  I have tried to offer that same level of attention to others and I don’t think I have achieved it.  I’ve probably come close, but certainly not with any consistency.  Something for me to still strive for.

We are dislocated in the world.  Cars, Television, games, opinions, political parties, and religious denominations seem to contrive to keep us from seeing each other.  Be radical: smile back!  Go visiting strangers in a nursing home, bring some sunshine to others, sit a moment and listen to another person and discover what is on his or her mind at that moment.  So simple, and yet so rarely done.  Take up the radical work of resistance: visit, listen, smile!  Offer the practice of presence, the courage of compassion, the gift of listening.  You have that power within you to offer hospitality to others in a dislocated world; to welcome someone in and help them locate themselves amidst the odds and ends of experience.

The little girl said, “I stopped and helped her cry.”

Let us not turn away from the pain we know.

Let us have the courage of compassion.

To cry with another is to stand before the hurt and recognize it for what it is

and to acknowledge its place within our being.

May we each have the courage, the conviction and the capacity to cry with one another – to care for one another.

In a world without end

May it be so

Growing Faith
Rev. Douglas Taylor
UUCB
12-10-06

We planted bulbs at my house this year.  It is the first time I’ve ever done that.  I’ve planted seeds before.  I once planted dill and raised a handful of dill caterpillars on it.  But I’d never dug up the earth at the end of the growing season and entrusted bulbs to the cold earth.  I see why they say ‘to plant a garden is an act of faith.’  The first day after putting our bulbs in the earth I chased a squirrel around the front yard to retrieve one of my tulip bulbs.  I returned the half-eaten bulb to the ground, I don’t know if the squirrel got the bulb again later but the garden seems undisturbed.  So, I’ve done my part.  I put them in the ground, watered them, and chased off a predator.  My part in this is done; it is the Earth’s turn.  I look forward to seeing the colors in spring.  With trust and confidence, I look forward to seeing my bulbs do what bulbs do.  There is a grower’s faith that says ‘you are not in control of the growing, but there is a lot of messy, hard work for you to do.’

And we like to see the results; we like to see the spring bloom of flowers.  Spring is certainly the time I notice the beauty of the Earth.  People like spring: all that growth and bloom and color and happiness and beauty and fullness.  But if I were to ascribe a season for faith, I would not pick spring.  For surely it is in winter we experience the depths of loneliness and separation through the bleak and darker days – whether it is literally winter or the metaphorical winter-times of life.  Those are the times when faith is nurtured; it is in times of despair that faith is uncovered.  Not when we are happy and content, but precisely when we most need it.  Faith comes alive in the darkness and in the heartache of our deepest experiences.

I remember one snowy night more than fifteen years ago when my car spun out of control on the icy roads.  It was dark, the wind was blowing snow across the icy roads; I was on my way to work.  I had the overnight shift at the residential home for the developmentally disabled adults.  I was working for the Clinton County ARC at the time in Plattsburg NY while finishing my Bachelor’s degree.  It was late, it was cold, I was young, the car was a used little Dotson sports car my dad had given me when I got married, and I thought I could handle the road.  So I tried to pass one of the cars creeping along the road.  As I moved into the other lane and sped up, the car slipped and spun around and hurtled backward the rest of the way across the street toward the telephone pole and the snow bank.  A few seconds later, wedged firmly into the snow bank, I noticed my headlight illuminating the telephone pole half a foot away.  The front of my car, which was really the back based on the direction I was traveling, had slid within inches of that pole at forty or more miles per hour.  I’m guessing I was not in mortal danger during the accident; the pole would have hit the passenger side of the car.  But then again, who knows.

It wasn’t the first time I’d spun off the road into a snow bank and it would not be my last.  In and of itself the event was not remarkable beyond the short term consequences.  I wasn’t hurt, the car was not damaged.  I was late to work, but folks in the Plattsburg area expect delays like this when the weather turns foul – which is does regularly each winter.  And the thoughts that flashed through my head as the car was spinning out of my control were also unremarkable save one.  Certainly it is interesting to me that I did not panic, I was detached from the event as it unfolded.  I noticed the telephone pole and calculated where it would connect with the car if it connected, I noticed how foolish I must have looked to the car I had almost passed, I considered before I hit the snow bank that this was probably going to make me late to work.  Much of that, I think, can be chalked up to the standard teenage inability to comprehend the possibility of one’s own mortality.  But there was another thought that flashed through my mind that I suspect may have been somewhat more than that.  I remember thinking in the instant when I noticed it was all going out of control: I’m going to be alright.

Now, if this were merely the confidence that I would survive, that I would live, I would consider it another example to the standard teenage inability to comprehend the possibility of one’s own mortality – but that’s not what it was.  Instead it was a confidence that with all the possible outcomes of the moment, I would be all right.  I don’t remember considering all of them and thinking, “Yeah, I could handle that.”  But I do remember thinking, “I’m going to be alright,” in the sense that whatever happens, come what may, I will do what ever is the next thing to be done.  Where did that come from?  Have you ever felt that?

I remember watching my mom while I was growing up in the church.  Churches are always messy, busy, slightly chaotic places when things are going well.  Some people would respond with much anxiety and running around.  There were always several things up in the air and none of them were going as planned or at least they were demanding full attention of several people who could not give their full attention … I’m sure many of you know what that can be like because that happens here at this church as well.  Anyway, my mother, who was the Director of Religious Education for many years and the Minister of Religious Education for a few more years, would remain calm in midst of all this and just continue to do the next thing that needed to be done.  She was a walking example of the axiom: this to shall pass.  I’m not sure I would have used these words then to describe what I was seeing, but now I can tell you, I learned a great deal about faith watching my mother move through church chaos with such calm.  She trusted that we would get done those things that needed to get done, and whatever we didn’t get done, well, we would figure that out when we got there.

Faith is a form of trusting, a confidence in life or in God or in yourself.  Having faith is occasionally seen to be the same things as believing; but it is not.  Faith is something like belief, but not the same as belief.  They point to faith as a form of trust or even confidence.  Certainly I agree that ‘faith’ is not the same thing as ‘belief’.  One distinction is that belief is passive, while faith is active.  For example, the Greek word for “belief” describes a mental stance, but the Greek word for “faith” was a noun-verb hybrid concerning a physical act based on a mental stance.  I had an active confidence that I would be alright – I did not ‘believe’ I could handle the car so as to avoid the telephone pole or that I could not be hurt or broken somehow.  At the time, at least, what I had was simply a confidence.

Last week I pulled out a quote form Painter Paul Gardner who said, “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.”  And so the same could be said of my faith or anyone’s faith.  It’s never finished; it simply stops in interesting places.  My faith is like a moving feast, it is dynamic and changing.  Life is always changing.  Mount Everest, the huge mountain standing as a perfect symbol of massive, unyielding, constant, solid reality is “growing” a quarter of an inch per year as the continental plate under India pushes under the Asian Plate to its north.  The whole universe is alive and pulsing with movement.  Life is always changing and it is to life that we must stay true.  And so, faith is always growing.

This summer I attended a minister’s conference on faith led by author and Buddhist meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg.  Salzberg had recently written a book entitled Faith: Trusting your own Deepest Experience which was the focus of her time with us. She approached faith from a Buddhist perspective which was delightful for me who had only ever explored faith though Christian perspectives and Unitarian Universalist perspectives (most of which are rooted in the Western/Christian perspective of faith.)

To talk of Buddhism we begin with the four noble truths, but I don’t really want to talk about the four noble truths.  I want to talk about the three stages of faith Salzberg described.  But of course I must briefly remind us of the four noble truths.  So, briefly: all life is suffering and that all suffering is due to attachment.  The reason we experience suffering is we are trying to hold on to something: desires, love, or happiness.  There is a way out of the suffering, a way to “extinguish the thirst,” to not get caught by all the attachments, which is the path of non-attachment, the eightfold path toward enlightenment, (right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right understanding, right mindfulness, and right concentration.)  It takes many, many pages of holy text to unpack that eight-fold path mentioned in the fourth noble truth.

Sharon Salzberg sat in the front and spoke of her experiences and her understanding of Buddhism.  I took a few notes, but had to buy her book because I didn’t take very good notes as I was held by her presence.  She made everyone in the room comfortable with her warmth.  She had not a joyous look so much as an amused look in her eye, and she threw out gentle one-liners now and then as she described to us her experiences of suffering and faith.  I remember thinking, “Oh, I wish I could be like that.” I try to be, I see many of you are like that in your own ways.  I bump into so many of you in this congregation who have a radiance about you.

“Bright faith,” is what Buddhism calls that first level of faith.  It is the beginning; like falling in love.  This faith is usually inspired by someone or something from outside you.  Typically when you are in Bright Faith you have abundant energy about your faith, it is a time of discovery.  Bright faith is said to be an intoxicating time of exuberant.  It is marked by a surrender of apathy and cynicism.  Every stage of faith, Salzberg told us, has a near enemy and a far enemy.  The far enemy of Bright Faith is apathy and cynicism: those things that are the near opposite of this kind of faith.  The near enemy of Bright Faith is Blind faith.  With blind faith we not only surrender apathy and cynicism, we also surrender discriminating intellect – and Blind Faith is not a beginning, it is a conclusion.  Bright faith though is recognized as the starting point.  It is a time to enjoy, and when you see it in others it is something to be encouraged.  Do you remember when you discovered Unitarian Universalism?  For some it was an experience of Bright Faith, of falling in love, of joyous discovery; but not necessarily.  For some, discovering Unitarian Universalism was an experience in the next stage of faith.

Verifying Faith, Buddhism calls it.  Verifying Faith is the time when we balance our discovery with examination.  It is a time of testing and doubting; checking what you’ve been told against your own experiences.  Salzberg writes, “It is a common assumption that faith deepens as we are taught more about what to believe; in Buddhism, on the contrary, faith grows only as we question what we are told, as we try teachings out by putting them into practice to see if they really make a difference in our lives.”  (p 48)

The far enemy of Verifying faith is fear.  Fear keeps many people from checking their beliefs against reality lest they discover their beliefs are false.  Fear keeps people stuck.  As I said last week in the sermon on Doubt, “Doubt is the handmaiden of truth, the constant attendant of new discovery.  Doubt keeps us honest.”  The far enemy of Verifying Faith is fear; the near enemy is walk-away doubt or unskilled doubt.  Salzberg explains:

Unlike skillful doubt which bring us closer to exploring the truth, unskillful doubt pulls us farther away.  A story from the Buddha’s life illustrates the consequences of unskillful doubt.  After his enlightenment, the Buddha arose from his place under the bodhi tree and set out walking along the road.  The first person he encountered was struck by the radiance of his face and the power of his presence.  Dazzled, the man asked, “Who are you?”  The Buddha replied, “I am an awakened one.”  The man just said, “Well, maybe,” and walked away.  Had he shown curiosity, taken the time to follow up on his doubt by asking questions, he might have discovered something profoundly transforming. (p57)

Doubt is useful – it is the handmaiden of truth.  But walk-away doubt leaves opportunities behind.

Abiding Faith usually does not arrive until after the fear, the testing, the doubt, the suffering, and the despair.  Abiding faith is hard to describe and most attempts are trite and cliché because they are bound by one’s own experience: they have to be.  In abiding faith you have come to know and understand the ultimate, unwavering rock upon which you can rest all your concern.  It is yours and yours alone and the words you use to name it are your words borne of your living. It is that which holds all.  You may have beliefs that describe that in which you have faith, but beliefs are not faith.

There is so much suffering in the world, so much work to be done to ease the hurting and to heal the heartache.  Having faith does not stop the hurt, but it does place the suffering in a bigger context of meaning.  Consider this story:

One day some people came to the master and asked, “How can you be happy in a world of such impermanence, where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness, and death?” The master held up a glass and said, “Someone gave me this glass, and I really like this glass.  It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight.  I touch it and it rings!  One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table.  I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly.” (From Sitting Zen by James Ishmael Ford; p85 of Everyday Spiritual Practice, Scott Alexander, ed.)

The glass is already broken.  Don’t cling to it, enjoy it now.  The tulip bulb is already stolen by the squirrel – plant anyway; the chaos has already caused trouble and misunderstanding at church – do your work with passion anyway; the car has already hit the telephone pole and is broken, you are broken – live anyway.  Enjoy life now, anyway.  Abiding faith does not change my suffering or heartache, it only changes me and how I am with my suffering and heartache.  Abiding Faith includes the Bright Faith and the Verifying Faith.  There is the joy and the pain, the hope and the frustration, the unquenchable question that demands an answer and the unwavering assurance that the answer holds only limited use.  “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)  Abiding Faith holds assurance that life at its root, though ineffable, is enough.

We, of course, move in and out of these three stages of faith.  Bright Faith is not a one-time experience.  It can recur.  I know I have Abiding Faith, but I am still occasionally swept up in the energy and excitement of Bright Faith all over again, but not so often.  I feel I have been in the Verifying Faith stage for quite some time in relation to our communal faith.  I have been testing and questioning Unitarian Universalism as a faith tradition.  Many of my sermons are just such a testing of my own faith and of our faith.  I know, though, that I have seen what Emerson might call an ‘inner knowing,’ a glimpse of something upon which I rest all my concern.

Let go, trust in your self.  Let go of attachments: you can’t make the things you love last forever.  Let go and discover within you that divine seed that can spring forth in the dead of winter. To be true to yourself you will suffer and uncover an Abiding Faith that will last through suffering and loss and fear and even in the face of death.  With Abiding Faith you know, perhaps even despite the evidence, that you’re going to be alright.

In a world without end

May it be so.

A Reasonable Doubt, and Beyond
12-3-06
Rev. Douglas Taylor

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” (Hebrews 11:1) according to the author of the letter to the Hebrews in the Christian Scriptures. “The evidence of things not seen.” Of course, Mark Twain put it more bluntly saying, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”  Or at least that is how some define faith.  There are however a large number of religious traditions that do not characterize faith as a blind believing in things for which there is no evidence.  Of course I wish to tell you about how this works in our particular faith tradition, but I am always aware that this year the children are focusing on World religions in their Sunday School classes.  I like to allow that to effect our focus here in the sanctuary as well.

There is a book I picked up because I heard about it during an interview with the author on NPR a year or two ago.  Doubt: a history by Jennifer Hecht is a thick book that runs through the history of great doubters like Socrates and Jesus, Confucius and Thomas Jefferson.  She explores doubt in the various world religions as well as great secular traditions.  “Like belief,” she writes in the introduction, “doubt takes a lot of different forms from ancient Skepticism to modern scientific empiricism, from doubt in many gods to doubt in one God, to doubt that recreates and enlivens faith and doubt that is really disbelief.” (Doubt: a history by Jennifer Hecht; p ix)

Many of us are here in this congregation because we were lead here by doubt.  It is not that doubting brought us to try this community.  But doubting is what led many of us away from other communities where doubt was discouraged, where questions were quarantined, where wondering about stuff was not welcomed.  Many people in this congregation left another faith community in doubt, or perhaps you were sent from or even kicked out of other communities because you had doubt about the creeds, and the beliefs, and the professions of faith.  Or maybe you never were all that connected to a faith community and began to experience doubts about the meaningfulness of the life you were leading.  However the details played out, doubt was a major element for many as they left.  And now, with doubts still in hand, you are here.

A Catholic acquaintance of mine attempted a compliment saying, “Douglas, you’ve got your work cut out for you, I think it’s great what your doing.  For so many people your church is their last chance.” And while, yes, it was patronizing, I took it in the spirit in which the comment was offered.  It is rather remarkable, this community where you are welcome as you are, doubts and all.  For many of us, I suppose this place could be considered our last chance.  But I think it is more accurate to recognize that for so many people this community is their first chance.  Many here find this to be the first chance to be in community without hiding some aspect of their faith.  Many here find this to be our first chance to be in a community where we allow our beliefs to change and grow and mature.

As a religious movement, Unitarian Universalism is constantly pushing itself beyond narrow definitions of religion.  We are perpetually searching for a better way to see and a better way to describe what we experience as religious people.  We do not claim to have all the answers and do not demand anyone to adhere to even a specific set of questions.  Here you’re allowed to be skeptical; indeed we encourage it for it sharpens truth.  William Ellery Channing, the preeminent preacher from the founding of American Unitarianism, offered the text from first Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 21 as his opening passage for the landmark Baltimore Sermon.  That sermon from nearly two hundred years ago that launched Unitarianism as a denomination in its own right rather than continuing as the heresy de jour of liberal Christianity.  He begin that sermon with the passage from Paul’s letter the Thessalonians, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is true.”  (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Unitarianism began as an iconoclastic faith; smashing the idols constructed under in the creeds and doctrines of the church.  Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.  At the inception of American Unitarianism, the major difference the Unitarians claimed was in their interpretation of Scripture.  Channing said in that landmark Baltimore Sermon that as Unitarians we “feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon [the Bible] perpetually.”  By claiming that the use of reason was key, we have over the years followed Channing’s example on nearly every aspect of religious life imaginable.

Reasonable doubt helps us to steer clear of many idolatries.  We do well to have a touch of agnosticism, a dash of doubt, if you will, in all of our religious statements.  After all, “The surest way to lose truth is to pretend you already possess it.” [Gordon Allport Becoming, p. 17]  Doubt is the handmaiden of truth, the constant attendant of new discovery.  Doubt keeps us honest.   For there is much we do not yet understand, more information is being uncovered on a regular basis.  New ideas, deeper understanding, and richer connections are always still coming.

Indeed at times it seems like we know so much and with the space three breaths I am suddenly struck by how little we understand.  “Now we see through a glass, darkly.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)  In his early book, Leaves for the Notebook of an Untamed Cynic, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote of his experiences as a pastor.  He recounted one experience with a dog owned one of his parishioners, a dog with hair hanging over its eyes.  When he inquired about it, saying would it not be kind to trim the poor dogs hair so it could see better, he learned that this breed of dog had evolved this way.  The hair protected the dog’s eyes in harsh conditions and thus the eyes had grown exceedingly sensitive to compensate for being covered with hair.  The eyes were so sensitive, that if the hair were trimmed the dog would be effectively blinded by the over stimulation of light.  For now we see through our dog hair, darkly.  Niebuhr saw it as a metaphor, complaining that many of his parishioners seemed to be like this dog: unable to see fully the light; always needing to filter the gospel lest they be stuck blind in receiving it in its fullness.  Niebuhr did not remain as a pastor for long.  Perhaps he was not able to keep his less-than-complimentary opinions of his congregants out of his sermons, I don’t know.  No, Niebuhr found his calling instead to be in academia as a theologian and ethicist.

People shield themselves from their doubts; we shield ourselves from reality itself when it shows itself to be in contradiction to what we were quite sure of yesterday.  We all do it.  Keeping a dash of doubt on hand is good; allowing a smidgen of skepticism to slide through every situation can save you from getting stuck in false certainty.

Certainty is an idol.  When you feel certain, beyond a doubt, that you understand yourself, God, the meaning of life or humanity’s place in the universe, then you are probably sitting on a false idol.  What is certainty? It is that which lies beyond a reasonable doubt.  Do they still use that phrase in a court of law?  You have to find the defendant guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”  In a court of law you are working from objective truths.  In religion we work from subjective truths.  It is possible to be certain beyond a reasonable doubt when dealing in the realm of objective truths.  We can objectively say “the man walked in the room around 11:00 at night.”  This can be verified as true and, more importantly it can, with contrary evidence, be shown to be false.

Subjective truth, on the other hand, “God changes lives through the transformative power of love,” can have all manner of contrary evidence thrown at it with possibly no effect.  “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)  No amount of evidence is going to make a difference to subjective truth when it is considered beyond a reasonable doubt.

Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian Paul Rasor characterizes liberal religion as “Faith without certainty.”  “This is not the same thing as faith without conviction,” he writes in his recent book titled Faith without certainty.   “It does mean that religious liberals tend to hold faith claims with a certain tentativeness.” (p ix)

Doubt is always an inherent part of faith, and theology should never be free from doubt.  Religious liberalism has always to some extent involved faith without certainty.  German Theologian Dorothee Solle has pointed out that faith without doubt is not stronger, it is simply more ideological.  The more important question is, does your theology matter in your life?  (Faith without Certainty by Paul Rasor p xxi)

It has been observed by many liberal theologians (Wittgenstein for one) that the limits of our language are the limits of our world.  The most intimate and ultimate levels of life are so enormous, so deep, and so mystical that they are unnamable.  There are no words in our dictionary with which we can give voice to our experiences.  If I were to try to articulate what I experience of God, it could only be like trying to catch running water in my bare hands, and then bring it in to the sanctuary to show you what running water is.  I simply do not have a firm enough grasp of how to communicate mystery.  It is not for lack of something to say, it for lack of words to properly articulate the experiences.

But  recognition of mystery is not the same as doubting the mystery, of course.  And as Davies said in our prayer this morning, “o God in whom we only half believe, we cannot altogether doubt.”  Being doubters does not mean we can give up and say, “Oh, well we’ll never understand.”  Ours is an iconoclastic faith – to be sure, but we smash the idols so we may see more clearly what needs to be there.  We leave behind old creeds and doctrines not only for the sake of leaving, but also for the sake of finding.

There was a delightful and provocative novel published about five years ago called Life of Pi.  It is the adventure of a shipwrecked boy named Pi traveling across the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger.  It is also a book about faith and truth.  In one scene before Pi gets on the boat he bumps into one of his teachers from school and they fall into a conversation about faith during which the boy learns that his favorite teacher is an atheist.  “Religion is darkness,” he tells Pi.  “There are no grounds for going beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no sound reason for believing anything but our sense experience.  A clear intellect, close attention to detail and a little scientific knowledge will expose religion as superstitious bosh.  God does not exist.”  (p 27)  Now, Pi is a deeply religious boy and at first does not know how to hold this new perspective.  But he goes on to say, to us, the readers:

I felt a kinship with him.  It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith.  Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them – and then they leap.

I’ll be honest about it.  It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics.  Doubt is useful for a while.  We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane.  If Christ played with doubt, so must me.  If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” then surely we are also permitted doubt.  But we must move on.  To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.  (p28)

Now, Agnosticism is a well represented theological perspective in this congregation, I am sure.  But that is why I offer Pi’s critique!  Is Agnosticism at times simply a cheap way of ducking the question?  While I was in seminary I had a teacher who would say to us, “No appeals to mystery before 5:00.”  She wanted us to struggle with the theological questions, to settle on an answer or two – even if only for a short time.  We were not allowed to throw our hands in the air to her questions “why is there suffering?” because she was training us to make hospital visits.  When someone dying of cancer looks up at you and asks “why am I suffering, what did I do wrong?” it is best not to say, “Well, God does move in mysterious ways,” and then shrug.  It may be theologically accurate but it is not very pastoral.

Perhaps it is only a matter of degree.  How severe an Agnostic are you?  I’ve been sorely tempted to buy the bumper sticker that reads: “Militant agnostic!  I don’t know and you don’t either!”  Instead I have a gentler admonition that says nearly the same thing: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

Unitarian Universalism is remarkable because here we are willing to doubt, willing to admit we do not own the corner on religious truth.  Painter Paul Gardner has said, “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.”  And so the same could be said of my faith and beliefs.  It’s never finished; it simply stops in interesting places.  We Unitarian Universalists have long insisted that we apply reason to our beliefs and making allowances for changes in beliefs.  If our reason leads us to doubt, then let our doubt be a process by which falsehood is burned away, a process whereby truth may be purified.

In a world without end,

May it be so.

Do You Want to Know a Secret?
The Gnostic Gospels
11-26-06
Rev. Douglas Taylor

In 1945 a farmer from the Nag Hammadi village in Upper Egypt while digging for fertilizer nitrates uncovered a 6-foot-tall clay jar.  Historians believe that fourth-century monks from the St. Pachomius monastery, near the present-day village of Nag Hammadi hid that clay jar there centuries before.  In the jar, bound in tooled gazelle leather, were the 52 manuscripts that are now known as the Gnostic gospels.

These papyrus texts: the Apocalypse of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Thomas were all so strange and radical it took decades for the information to come to the public.  Meanwhile the manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the first of which were uncovered in 1947, have been available to the public for quite some time.  The difference may be that the Dead Sea Scrolls are renderings of the Hebrew Scriptures.  While they are considered the oldest manuscripts of these texts, they are generally consistent with what we already knew of the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Nag Hammadi discovery however did not conform at all to what we already knew of the Gospel stories of Jesus.  What was uncovered in what are now called the Gnostic Gospels constituted the various letters, gospels, and sayings that were not included in the Bible.

One of the strong characteristics of these Gnostic books is that they offered the secret teachings of Jesus.  The opening greeting for The Secret Book of James reads: “Since you asked me to send you a secret book that was revealed to Peter and me by the Lord, I could neither refuse you nor dissuade you; so [I have written] it in Hebraic letters and have sent it to you – and to you alone.”  In the Gospel of Mary we read about the time: (Chap 6) “Peter said to Mary, “Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than any other woman.  Tell us the words of the savior that you know, but which we haven’t heard.”

The Gospel of Thomas begins with: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.” (Prologue)  And later (Chap 13) Jesus took Thomas, “and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.  When Thomas came back to his friends [the other disciples], they asked him, ‘What did Jesus say to you?’  Thomas said to them, ‘If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you.”

But my favorite set up of it is in the recently published Gospel of Judas where we find this: “Knowing that Judas was reflecting upon something that was exalted, Jesus said to him, ‘Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom.’” This element of it is all the more interesting based on the context.  These proclamations of secret truths are contained in documents have been only recently revealed from their hidden places.  The buried treasure condition in which these texts were found serves only to enhance the secret-ness of their content.

For all the mystique, these books might not have made it past the veil of academia if not for a young professor of religion from Princeton University.  It was Elaine Pagels who wrote The Gnostic Gospels in 1979, winning the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  It was that little book that sparked in the popular culture this interest in these obscure, so-called heretical religious writings.  Her more recent book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003), spent more than three months on the New York Times bestseller list.  Certainly books of a religious nature have been on the bestseller list before – the Left Behind series and the DaVinci Code, but the unique quality of this bestselling religious book is that it is not fiction.  Beyond Belief is a researched piece of scholarship offered in an engaging style palatable to the popular culture.  It was a very interesting response from the broader culture.  Every now and then I wonder what the western world would have been like if these hidden Gospels had been a regular part of the New Testament all these years.  What would it have been like?

The writings from the cave near Nag Hammadi have been kept in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.  Scholars from all over North America and Europe have studied these poems, prayers and sayings for quite some time now.  “They look like golden tobacco leaves inscribed with black ink,” Pagels says about the manuscripts that she first saw them preserved between sheets of Plexiglas. “The texts are quite beautiful.”

So, why they weren’t they included?  Why weren’t these accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus included in the Bible?  If there are four different accounts, why are there not five or six or even twenty-six?  How was it decided?

To begin with, any decent Bible will include a section at the beginning explaining the process of how the Bible was constructed.  “Biblia” means book or books.  It is a collection put together over time.  The Hebrew scripture was pulled together in an authoritative collection a few hundred years before the Christian scriptures were collected in this same way.  The Christian Scriptures were organized into what we know now as the New Testament around the same time as the Council of Nicaea and the creation of the Nicene Creed under Emperor Constantine in the fourth century of the Common Era.

According to the current scholarship of the Jesus Seminar, the earliest writings in the Christian Scripture are the letters of Paul and other letters attributed to Paul around 20 or 30 years after Jesus’ death.  The Gospel of Thomas was possibly written around this time as well, but it is hard to be certain.  For many years the stories were passed down in oral tradition until they were finally written down a generation or two later.  So, the claim that the author of the Gospel of Thomas was Thomas the apostle is quite unlikely.  Instead it is more likely that the author wrote down the story that had come to him or her through oral tradition as Thomas’ words.  The Gospel of Mark was likely written around the time of the destruction of the temple, in 70 C.E.  Ten to twenty years after that is the other synoptic Gospels were written down, along with the Gospel of Peter and a collection entitled Dialogue of the Savior.  Then around 90 or 100 C.E. the Gospel of John was written – this was roughly 60 or 70 years after the death of Jesus.  By 150 C.E., the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of James, and something called the Egerton Gospel had also been complied.

During all this time, each small community of Christians held a copy of one or two Gospels and perhaps a letter or a copy of a letter from Paul.  Each worshiped in a small way, rereading the words they had and interpreting them together.  The Christians of that time lived under constant threat of persecution.  They were regularly rounded up to be burned at the stake, beheaded, or torn apart by wild animals.  So they tended to gather in small and secluded groups.  Each community developed its own character and style based on the particular texts they held.  This is the way it was for the first few centuries.

In the beginning of the fourth century, the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine oversaw a shift in Christianity more radical than anything that has happened in Christianity since.  Christianity was a multifarious thing before Constantine.  Christians suffered great persecution during the first centuries. Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire, thus ending the persecution and ushering in an official theology.  This official theology included the Canon of the New Testament with Four Gospels to match Ezekiel’s vision of the four creatures worship around God’s throne.

The reactions to this were of three sorts.  Some, of course, accepted this change with open arms and saw it as a good thing.   These people saw the conversion of Constantine as the culmination of both the history of the church and the history of the empire.  Others saw it as a great apostasy and broke away from the community of Christians, forming their own separate sects.  These sects were a thorn in the side of the church for a while, but that is another chapter in early church history.

Of more interest this morning are those people who also saw the Emperor’s conversion to Christianity as an imperial takeover of the church, yet they did not wish to remove themselves communion with the church.  Instead they physically withdrew into the desert to practice a strict asceticism.  With the end of great persecution, the true Christian could no longer aspire to martyrdom and so instead they opted for monastic life to continue what they saw as their training.  The fourth century saw “a massive exodus of devoted Christians to the deserts of Egypt and Syria.” (from the Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalez; p 124)  Remembering that these were the Christians who rebelled against the merging of the church and the empire, and against the creation of an official theology as seen in the Nicene Creed, we should not be surprised that the texts of the “Gnostic Gospels” were centuries later found in Egypt written in the Coptic language, which is a first-century form of Egyptian.

Until a few decades ago, all that was known about these Gnostic gospels came from their detractors, the fourth-century bishops and archbishops who had denounced them as heretical works.  But as we can see, that was all part of the process of formalizing the beliefs of the Nicene Creed and ordaining the biblical canon.  In 367, Athanasius, the archbishop of Alexandria, sent an Easter letter to far-flung churches – including those monasteries out in Egypt and Syria, demanding that they destroy all the “illegitimate, secret books.” Obviously someone took a few of these texts out into the desert and buried them in order to preserve them.

What did these texts contain that is so radical and heretical?  What is Gnosticism?  The word Gnostic derives from the Greek word Gnosis, meaning “knowledge” or “insight.”  One component of Gnostic texts is that what they offer is the secret teachings of Jesus, the secret knowledge.  It also spelled out a strict duality between physical and spiritual with the physical being evil.  One predominant theology of Gnosticism contends that this world was a mistake created by a demigod.  Indeed, humanity is not of this evil world, instead we are fallen or entrapped by it; and thus are caught in the physical realm.  Most people are anesthetized to the truth.  Only those who uncover the truth (which can be found within) can transcend this world back into the true realm of heaven.

Much of the Gospel of Judas, for example, is taken up with Jesus laughing at the disciples, explaining the intricate cosmology of gods, demigods, and angels to them and then going away from them to visit ‘other great and holy generations.’   In the midst of it all Jesus says to Judas, “You will exceed them all, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.”  According to the Gospel of John, Satan whispered in Judas’s ear telling him to go betray Jesus.  In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus whispered in Judas’s ear telling him to conspire with Jesus to release him from his human façade.  And that is typical of the Gnosticism of that time.

Certainly, there is a part in this Gnostic theology that rings true for our way of faith: the part that about the truth being found within.  Emerson said as much: look within yourself, “there is no bar or wall in the soul where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins.”  The truth is found within, we like that idea from Gnosticism.  But the rest of Gnostic theology does not quite fit with Unitarian Universalism very well.  I certainly cannot believe this world is somehow a big mistake or cosmic joke, concocted by a malevolent and rebellious demigod.

And while many of the Gnostic Gospels support the strict duality of nature and spirit, The Gospel of Thomas goes the furthest in heretical idea that Jesus called us to be like him, to find the light within ourselves.  (Thom 70:1-2)  Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

As Pagels writes,

While Mark, Matthew, and Luke identify Jesus as God’s human agent, John and Thomas characterize him instead as God’s own light in human form.  … John calls him the “light of humanity,” and believes that Jesus alone brings divine light to a world otherwise sunk in darkness.  John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus.  But certain passages in Thomas’s gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made “in the image of god.”  Thus Thomas expresses what would become a central theme in Jewish – and later Christian – mysticism a thousand years later, that the “image of God” is hidden within everyone, although most people remain unaware of its presence. (p40 – 41)

Pagels demonstrates fairly convincingly that the Gospel of John was written as are argument against the ideas outlined in the Gospel of Thomas.  The character of Thomas in the Gospel of John, for example, is continually shown as a faithless, doubting disciple who does not understand and does not receive the fullest of Jesus’ blessings in the way the other disciples do – according to John.  Also, there is the deeper distinction of how you find the Kingdom of God or the divine light.  According the John, Jesus is “the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through” him.  Incidentally, in John’s Gospel, that line comes when Jesus is telling the disciples that he is going to prepare them a place in the Kingdom, and he says, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”  (John 14)  Guess which disciple John has saying “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  You guessed it Thomas!  (You don’t know the way, Thomas?  I am the Way.)

Thomas’ Gospel, on the other hand, holds the conviction that the divine dwells as “light” within all beings.  (Thom 24:3) “There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world.”  It also has Jesus saying, (Thom 108) “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I myself will become that person and the mysteries shall be revealed to him.”  According to the Gospel of Thomas ‘the Way’ is not Jesus, ‘the way’ is within.  Certainly Jesus is a major part of that process, (Thom 77) “I am the light that is over all things.  I am all; from me all things came forth, and to me all attained.  Split a piece of wood I am there.  Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”  In fact, there are striking similarities between the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas. John, reacting against the Gnostic theology, carries some Gnosticism forward.  Just as we Unitarian Universalists reacting against Calvinism carry a surprising amount of Calvinism into our theology.  But they are very different in answering the question “who is Jesus?”  I wonder what it would have looked like today if Thomas’s Gospel had been included in the canon.

One might ask how John prevailed over Thomas to be included in the official canon.  Was it that John’s Gospel was better connected to the people in positions of authority at the right times?  Was it a matter of historical luck-of-the-draw?  Was it that John’s Gospel had a better campaign manager, a bigger war chest, a more effective set of smear tactics?  Is that John’s Gospel was more accurate?  I tend to think it was more pragmatic that all that.  I think John’s Gospel leaned more toward an organizing principle for authority, it offered incentives for the people to be a part of the system: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”  If word got around that the Kingdom of God was within you and the real work was to explore yourself, what would you need the church for?

The people wanted to know God and to know what they needed for salvation.  What does it take to be a true Christian?  The church wanted them to hear that the way to know God was to come to church.  The way to salvation was through Jesus and there was no other way.  This makes it a lot easier to build a church.  It makes it a lot easier for an Empire to control its citizens.

But we Unitarian Universalists have been managing with the Emersonian/Thomastic message or personal search for about two hundred years now.  I will admit that I have heard attempts to build a message saying the only way to be a true Unitarian Universalist is to go to church.  This message, interestingly, comes out around the time of financial campaigns for the UUA and for the individual churches.  So keep alert!  I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool institutionalist.  I believe in the power of our gathered community.  I believe strongly that the institution is worth supporting; but not for the purpose of controlling people or raising money – that’s getting it all backwards!  The institution is here to support and nurture the light that shines out from you – that unique divine light that shines out from each of us as a ray of hope, a beacon of truth, a spark of holiness.

In a world without end.

May it be so.

A Theology of Resistance
November 5, 2006
Rev. Douglas Taylor

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Ella Baker!  In 1982 Sweet Honey in the Rock, on their album Breaths, had this song entitled “Ella’s Song.”  Ella Baker was one of the ‘behind the scenes’ movers-and-shakers of the civil rights era.  She participated in organizations and structures that effected change.  She was a field secretary and later a branch director of the NAACP.  Ella helped organize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  She was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a major organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  She was a quiet leader in these organizations.  She remains comparatively unknown alongside the big names, the men, which history remembers of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s.  The song written by Bernice Johnson Reagan of Sweet Honey on the Rock immortalizes Ella’s words of struggle, hope, and freedom.  Ella Baker was a woman of power who helped other people realize their power.  She was a friend and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. and is noted to have argued with him at times.   In his 1963 book, Strength to Love, Dr. King wrote, “The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!”   Ella was a nonconformist, to be sure.  She was a woman who spoke out and acted out and challenged the racist and sexist structures of oppression.  Ella was a trailblazer for freedom.

I’m a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard
At times I can be quite difficult, I’ll bow to no man’s word

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

The path to freedom during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was through Non-violent Resistance.  The non-violent component is the piece that we often hear about; the non-violent aspect was the radical new method that turned everything upside down.  And the only problem with our continual lifting up and praising of the non-violent facet of the movement is the risk of losing the other half of the equation.  It was not simply non-violent.  It was non-violent direct action; non-violent resistance.

The eighteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus tells The Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:2-6).

2He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. 3And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’

4”For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”

I don’t know about you, but this small parable surprised me when I bumped into it.  It just does not seem like the kind of thing you would find in the Bible.  It is just so pragmatic!  “I’ll see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out.” Ella’s story reminds me of this widow in the parable from the gospel of Luke.  The persistence of the people who seek justice, who accomplish reform, who make a difference, is remarkable.  The persistence of those who will not sit down and wallow in pity, of those who stand up to injustice though the odds are stacked against them, of those who stare unjust authority in the face and say, “grant me justice against my adversary,” is remarkable indeed.  The persistence of those who practice resistance is the key to accomplishing justice.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Ella Baker understood that organizations are necessary to accomplish justice.  As you have perhaps heard me say before, goodness must be organized.

There seems to be a recurring half-truth among people of faith that the highest form of religion and spirituality is some sort of mystical aestheticism or monastic retreat from the material world to focus on the sweet nectar of solo divine communion.  We are by no means free from this misconception.  Our own Henry David Thoreau is remembered so fondly for his retreat into Walden.  His theology of self-reliance and freedom of conscience is highly revered among us.  Thoreau’s reverence for nature, his self-sufficiency, and insistence that every one march to the beat of his or her own drummer, his severe distaste for organized government and distrust of authority, goes to the heart of many Unitarian Universalists.  Thoreau poses an odd mix of retreat and engagement, but both actions are a form of faithful resistance!

On the fourth of July, 1845, Thoreau moved into his rough-hewn cabin on Walden Pond on the outskirts of Concord, and he wrote what one colleague (Rev. Patrick O’Neil) has called “his immortal apologia for retreating into the sanctuary of Natural surroundings far from the madding crowd:”

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

And two years later, when he came out from Walden, he wrote:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spend any more time for that one.

The account of Thoreau’s time at Walden was not published for several years.  When it was published, it was received with great acclaim!  But when Henry David Thoreau came out of the Walden what he presented to the world was his short essay on “Civil Disobedience.”  Dr. Martin Luther King kept a dog-eared copy of that short essay on hand for sustenance and encouragement.  When Thoreau came out of the Walden what he presented to the world was his essay on “Civil Disobedience.”  The common thread between his book Walden and his essay “Civil Disobedience” is the faithful resistance to conformity, the commitment to one’s own conscience.  Resistance is not isolation; it is engagement with a vision toward justice and a better tomorrow.

Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Back when I was living in Montgomery County, Maryland, I participated in a grassroots, interfaith, political lobbying group called Action In Montgomery, or “AIM”.  This was based on the Industrial Areas Foundation that was founded by Saul Alinsky in Chicago in the 1940.  People from all sorts of faiths – Jewish, Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Unitarian Universalist – came together to advocate for issues of common concern in the community.  Many people were involved from the start with the reflection and discussion about what the needs were.  I showed up after things were already cooking, I walked in when it was time for the action to start.

I remember in particular an AIM meeting my family and I attended on county funding for housing held at a little Methodist church. Over 200 people from nearly 15 churches tried hard that evening to fit into a very small sanctuary!  My family and I sat up in the choir seats next to the pulpit.  (If I can’t be in the pulpit just put me in the choir and I’ll be happy.)  It was a great meeting– exciting and efficient: a kind of mix between a tent revival and a well-run finance committee meeting.  Near the end of the meeting there was a Call to Action. “Now, we’ve talked about power before,” said the speaker calling us to action. “We need some power now to see this housing proposal safely through the budget process of the County Council. We’ve got power right here in this room tonight. We are that power.”  My daughter leaned over to my wife and whispered, “We have the power?”  “Yes, we do,” my wife responded.  “Do I have the power?” my daughter asked incredulously. “Yes,” my wife said smiling, “You do.”  My daughter and I responded to the Call to Action and signed up to help see the proposal through.  It was fascinating to sit with my 11 year-old-daughter talking about a dedicated funding line in the county budget with a member of the county council.

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Ella Baker was affectionately known as the Fundi, which is a Swahili word for a person who passes skills from one generation to another.  Through her efforts with school desegregation and the organizing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Baker shaped the Civil Rights movement in a very basic way: by doing it without seeking fame or recognition and truly making a difference.

To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

So, what about you?  Do you have the power? Do you believe in freedom? Will you persist against injustice until unjust authority is worn out?  Are you a nonconformist?  Can you shed some light?  Will you wade in the water?  Are you a part of the resistance?  Perhaps you are thinking you came to this faith to retreat from the maddening crowd, to restore your soul, to find a deeper spiritual connection with God; you didn’t sign-up for the resistance!  Well, first I will say ‘OK, that’s fine; but you know of course that your retreat is a form of faithful resistance.’  Resisting the subtle and pervasive pressure to conformity!   And second I will say, at some point you must come out from retreat and engage the maddening world in active resistance, at some point you must leave Walden for we are in a time of great need for justice and resistance.  It is time for you to leave Walden for you have “several more lives to live, and [can] not spend any more time for that one.”

Colleague and wise soul, Alice Blair Wesley says, “What all the kings, presidents, generals, CEOs, mafia dons and celebs put together do, is ultimately far less important than what people in free churches do, when the people faithfully seek together to find and to live out the ways of love.”  That is why we are here, that is the grand purpose for which this and any other free church exists: to grow and to serve; to faithfully seek together to find and live out the ways of love; to be a community of resistance.

When you joined this congregation you signed up for the resistance.  Dr. King wrote: “we are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability.  We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.”  As Unitarian Universalists we too are called in this way.  We are not called to be respectable among the other religions; we are not called to be palatable or popular or within any proximity of prevailing opinion.  We are called upon to be radical, to be a community of resistance, to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.  Indeed most churches are somewhat counter cultural, much of what goes on is against the grain of the pervasive culture: loving one another rather than competing with one another, giving yourself away rather than spending money to gather things to you, the first shall be last and the last shall be first¸ and all that sort of thing.  But Unitarian Universalist churches are both counter to the pervading culture as well as counter too much of standard protestant ‘church’ culture, too.  Here we strive to be to be not only counter cultural but radically transformative of culture as well.

Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me
I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny

We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes

Welcome to the resistance: here we insist that all are welcome, all are inherently worthy and equally filled with human dignity.  Here we buck conformity and call each to live as a human being not as a market niche, not as a label, not as an illness, not as a stereotype.  Welcome to the resistance.  Stand up and be counted among those who are human in community.  Together we can change the world.

In a world without end,

May it be so.