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Unitarian Church of Sharon
4 N. Main St.
Sharon, MA 02067
781-784-3652
E-mail UCS
Spirit of Love
Sermon by Rev. Deborah Cayer
March 4, 2007
Several years ago I was at a community meeting at the high school. Something big had happened, I don’t remember exactly what, but clergy and others were there because the situation was bad. At one point, someone from the school came around to the adults and asked if one of us would say something to the gathered teens. We all immediately turned to the senior rabbi and drafted him for the job.
And that was a good thing, because in the middle of the angst and anxiety in that huge gathering, he said something very simple. He looked at the sad, huddled teens and he said that the adults who were there with them wanted them to think about two things. First, he said, we wanted them to think about the question “Who are you?” Not on the outside, but on the inside. Who, truly, are you? He said we wanted them to always remember that who they are is unique and precious beyond measure, and every person’s first job is to take care of themselves.
And the second thing, he said, was to think about “Whose are you?” To what people, what tradition do you belong? What larger group holds you up when you’re sinking and can’t see the way to keep moving forward? He was brilliant, in the sense of bringing light and love to a very difficult situation, and he was tremendously reassuring and comforting. Who are you? And, Whose are you?
I believe those same questions apply to us: “Who are you?” And, “Whose are you?” I don’t think we need a crisis before we think about these things. It’s helpful to know the answers to these questions all the time, even in familiar places as ordinary as the supermarket check out line. Because even things as ordinary as those ridiculous, bizarre headlines and those most unflattering pictures on the covers of the tabloids can wear you down without your noticing it. Banality does that; it’s numbing and chilling and causes you to go numb and cold. And so you tend to laugh or dismiss in disgust those things that make you feel that way.
If you’ve ever been stranded outside in winter when you’re wet and cold and quickly going numb, you know how physically difficult it can be to keep moving, even at the very same time that your mind knows how absolutely necessary it is that you don’t stop, that you keep moving toward warmth and shelter.
In a situation such as the extremely ordinary experience of standing in a check out line looking at a starlet’s raggedly shaved head, you might tend to laugh or say “uuugghhhh” and shake your head in disgust, maybe even make a remark to the person behind you. Who would blame you?
But when I catch myself doing this, I remind myself that disgust disconnects. Disgust is a response that separates an individual from others. In spiritual terms, disgust is the equivalent of sitting down in the snow in wet clothes. While it can feel absolutely right in the moment, it doesn’t lead to a good outcome. It’s actually just information—information telling us we would be wise not to stop, but instead to keep moving.
In spiritual terms, the way to keep moving is by staying open, staying present, staying flexible. It can be distasteful and difficult to stay open to another person who makes choices that are very different from our own. But still, it’s important not to indulge in disgust, even in the moment that we’re discerning the limits that are appropriate for our self. It’s important in that process to keep part of our self open, to stay in relationship, because connection and relationship are the places from which we can work most effectively for change, both in our own heart and own community.
Who are you? And Whose are you?
One of the hymns this morning asks, Where is our holy church? And responds, “Where race and class unite...” It says in effect that in our tradition, church is not so much a place as it is an event, an experience, something that happens between people when we gather together. Even more, it says that when we come here we’re more than just a collection of individuals. When we gather, something happens that makes us something more together as a community than we are by ourselves alone.
The words hint at a larger truth, which is that a congregation is not a club. We don’t come here just for our own self satisfaction. We don’t meet only to huddle against the larger culture, as much as we might feel the need to do that sometimes. Nor do we meet only for social reasons, to spend a lovely bit of time with others who confirm our lifestyle, our choices, and our ideas. It’s nice and it can feel really fun and good when those things happen, but I don’t believe those are the most important things that get affirmed here. In fact, while I think affirmation is incredibly important, I don’t think affirmation is the most important thing that happens at church, or what bonds us together.
So what is the most important thing? What is it that not only keeps us coming back, but actually holds us together? What’s the spiritual equivalent of duct tape for religious liberals? What holds us together in health giving, life supporting ways? What offers us real warmth and shelter?
These questions are important because what they orient us toward is the power of our liberal religious community. Liberals get accused all the time of being vague and indecisive, of being waft-y and waffle-y. And sometimes that’s unfortunately the case; at times we’re so open that we can’t hold or harness vital energy for real change. I believe that if we really want to make a difference in the world we need to know the ground on which we stand, because that knowledge, that understanding offers us some real holding power, and also some traction. It offers us the power to truly live and breathe and act in most effective ways.
As religious liberals we’re used to thinking about the question “Who are you?” Our tradition has put great emphasis on the individual, on individual development and fulfillment. We locate ourselves in the western religious and secular traditions that recognize that human beings are born into an inherent state of freedom. In our religious tradition we take this seriously. From the time they’re young, we teach our children to look inside, to ask questions, to explore, to seek and to find their own answers, their own meanings. We speak of our adult spiritual lives as a journey, as a quest for truth and meaning. We expect to grow and change, and we fully expect that we are capable of finding these answers, this meaning.
We’re less practiced at thinking about the answer to the question, “Whose are you?” Liberal theology took apart a lot of old ideas about “the Big Who” sometime in the middle of the last century, and it’s made us a little shy about boldly claiming that we belong to something larger than ourselves. But in fact, whatever our theological understanding, we do belong to something larger than ourselves.
But the truth is that each of us are born into a natural set of conditions, which in religious terms is called a covenant, or sometimes a covenant of being. At a basic level, covenant is simply the natural, given set of circumstances into which we’re born. Rebecca Parker tells the story of going to meet her long lost cousins for the first time just as she was beginning a new professional career as President of Starr King School for the Ministry. She had already mastered being a teacher, a parish minister, and was an accomplished cellist. She had been feeling very proud of herself for being so uniquely accomplished, until she had the chance to read the bumper stickers on her cousins’ cars as she walked toward the house where the reunion was happening. As it turned out, all of her relatives were either teachers, ministers or professional musicians, several were all these at once, and one was even the dean of a seminary.
She says this experience was a reminder to her that before we create covenants through our intentional promises to one another, we inherit a larger reality that is the foundation of our lives. We inherit a particular segment or sequence of DNA; we live within a set of natural laws such as gravity and thermodynamics and relativity. We think we’re absolutely unique and self formed, but the truth is that we’re not only part of a particular family who share a set of tendencies, we’re also part of the family of humanity that lives in a particular corner of the cosmos. We’re all subject to the same larger realities of heat and cold, light and dark, gravity and centrifuge. This natural, larger, given reality is the covenant into which we find ourselves born.
The theologian Bernard Loomer talks about the nature of reality as “Web.” Loomer says, “We start with the notion of the Web as a world in which the entities in it, including the people, are bound together as interrelated. We are dependent on each other, and yet each claims a kind of independence from all that goes on. The higher one goes in the evolutionary scale, the greater the concern for independence, but one never loses the sense of the dependence on the others within the context of an environment in which one lives and moves and has his or her being.
“In this sense there is no such thing as a self-made person or a self-made jellyfish or a self-made anything. Everything that exists has contributed to its own existence in part. Everything that exists has been contributed to by the context out of which it has emerged.”
For Loomer, all of this means that “the power that is most deeply consonant with the nature of the Web has to be mutual in its character, in contrast to the traditional notion of power. Unilateral power…is wrongheaded….under the notion of the Web…power in the deepest sense is always mutual. It is a giving and receiving. It is influencing and being influenced.” (Herz, pp. 50-51)
This relational mutuality is the power of love, and it is the foundation of the liberal church. Our thinking begins with the individual, but the individual as he or she exists within the larger context of an interdependent web whose nature is relational and mutual; in other words, an inherently essential condition of the web is a form of love. In recognition that our lives are rooted in love, we use our freedom to make intentional promises so that our actions are in accord with this larger reality.
This concept of covenant and intentional promise making is so important for religious liberals that all our rights of passage are in the form of promises. We make intentional promises to our beloved when we unite our lives in marriage or holy union. We make promises to our children when we bring them to church to be dedicated. We exchange promises with our lay leaders and our volunteer church school teachers to act in certain ways while we’re in these jobs, these roles. We exchanged promises when I was installed as your minister, and when Louise became our Director of Religious Education, that we would act in certain ways during the time we engage in this shared ministry together. We ask new committees and groups to create intentional covenants to guide them while they work together in a particular ministry of the congregation. We make these agreements in accordance with the spirit of love.
Love is the doctrine, the teaching of this church. It always has been. Like other faiths, our religious tradition teaches that at the very heart of life, the ground of all being, the nature of reality, is love. In recognition of this deceptively simple fact which is actually a huge, revolutionary claim that changes everything once you let the idea into your mind and heart, in recognition of the essential and inherent nature of love, not only do we treat each other with truth and kindness, but also we push for legislation and work heartily for reform of all kinds.
Religious liberals don’t talk much about sin, but what we do say is that the greatest sins are the ones that separate a person from this essential ground of being, this natural condition of relational, mutual love. In that separation, all kinds of bad things enter in: disrespect, prejudice, oppression, violence, even war.
This essential, inherent love that I’m talking about isn’t primarily a feeling. It’s not the love spoken of on a greeting card; it’s not even the relieved feeling of belonging we each sometimes get when we come to church and finally feel at home. Love is bigger and deeper than that. We start to realize that relationality and mutuality aren’t so much feelings as it they are ethical constructs, and in order to be in harmony with these essentials we have to act in certain ways. Love is an ethic, and that ethic asks something of us, and responding is not always easy.
If you’re in a good place and you’re happy and comfortable, that’s good. But you would be wise to take a breath and buckle up, because just like anything that is real, deep and long lasting, real love isn’t easy.
Love asks us to look deeper than our comfort zone. Love asks us to listen to the truth of another person’s experience. Love asks us to believe the other and make room for him or her, especially if they differ greatly from our own self. Love asks that we not act unilaterally, but instead that we act collaboratively. Which sounds easy and obvious, but when we’re in the middle of a situation it can be very, very difficult, even if we’ve practiced. Even if we’ve promised.
Alice Blair Wesley says that this mutual love makes itself known in spiritual communities as the spirit of persuasion. She admits that “Sometimes the spirit of persuasion blows up a gale that destroys all before it, and sometimes it is an equally killing, dead calm. We would be lying Pollyannas if we did not admit this, too. Every human group, including ours, is susceptible both to false hysteria and to self-satisfied or disillusioned apathy that will go nowhere. There are dangers and no guarantees with the spirit of persuasion.” (Herz, pp.5)
I believe love is always asking us, always offering us the opportunity to make the circle of life larger and more inclusive. And in order to be able to do that, like a reptile that has to shed its skin in order to grow, sometimes we need to shed our old beliefs, our old judgments, our old habits, our old prejudices that we didn’t even know we harbored, in order to let something new take shape in us and be born into the world.
Which isn’t always easy or pleasant. It can take time that we don’t have. It can be confusing while we learn new words and new ways of being in relationship. It can at times be scary and painful. It can be humbling. But if we do this work, we keep our feet on the ground, and we grow in our capacity to respond to others with love, especially when there’s conflict.
And sometimes this is the thing that makes all the difference. While history shows us that tyrants and empires alike eventually fall, the world’s religious traditions hold up the truth that love endures. The ethic of love has been trammeled and severely tested, but it has not only remained through all of human history, but slowly, gradually over time its influence has increased and grown. The ethic of love is the basis of all progressive reforms. So history suggests that in a time of global crisis and change, the ethic of love is the best possible basis for action.
In a world where traditional power and authority is falling apart everywhere, from the former Soviet Union to Hollywood, making people do all kinds of irrational things, from poisoning their enemies with radioisotopes to loosing it and cutting off their hair in public, the ethic of love is far from quick, simple or easy, but this difficult thing is our best hope. Nothing else seems to really work in the long run, and we want the world to work, with humans still in it, for the long run. So we need the ethic of love not only as a kind of duct tape that might hold our own spiritual lives together, but also as a more profound grounding for our action in the larger world.
Which isn’t news at all; it’s ancient wisdom that can be found at the heart of all religious traditions. Including our own liberal religious tradition, which reminds us yet again today that when we intentionally act in the spirit and ethic of love, our power to act for justice in the world increases tremendously.
The ethic of love, the spirit of love, asks much of us, but it also offers us much in return: a solid, trustworthy foundation for life itself. As Alice Blair Wesley reminds us, “If the center holds, if the spirit lives, there are no limits to what we may constructively do together for the sake of inspiration and mercy, justice, art, personal growth, or plain fun.”
Who are you? Only you can give the answer to that question. But as to the question, “Whose are you?” I believe that each one of us gathered here is a child of the spirit of love. We are born into a world that shapes us in fundamental ways, even before we take our first breath of air, and continues to shape us until our last. In honor of the wonder of this stunning truth, let us go forth this day, not so much to feel good in the world as to do good in the world. And as we give love, so may we receive love in return.
Amen.
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