“From Fear to Faith”
A Sermon for February Focus Month:
Peace, In Our Lives and in the World
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
February 4, 2007
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN:
The first reading is from the New Testament book, Corinthians:
[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Prophecies will come to an end. Tongues will cease. Knowledge will come to an end. We know in part, we prophecy in part. But when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. Now, we see in a mirror, in a riddle.
Then we will see face to face. Now I know in part. Then I will know fully.
Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is love.
The second reading is from the Jewish poet, Rabbi Alvin Fine:
Birth is a beginning
And death a destination
But life is a journey,
A going --- a growing
From stage to stage.
From Childhood to maturity
And youth to age.
From innocence to awareness
And ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion
And then perhaps to wisdom.
From weakness to strength
Or strength to weakness--
And, often back again.
From health to sickness
And back we pray, to health again.
From offense to forgiveness,
From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding---
From fear to faith.
From defeat to defeat to defeat---
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey,
stage by stage
A sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning
And death a destination
But life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage
Made stage by stage---
From birth to death
To life Everlasting.
SERMON: “From Fear to Faith”
Until I sat down to write this week, I was going to begin our series on “Peace” with some kind of historical overview that I intended to connect with the spiritual path of integrity. But when I sat down, it quickly became apparent that there is no real need for much of a history lesson here. There are many religious historical roots for peace that carry with them the admonition that peace is a definitive path of significant, spiritual integrity. As Unitarian Universalists, we covenant, through our principles, to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we covenant to affirm and promote the goal of world community with peace liberty and justice for all. And we draw on many religious sources, primarily among them the Judaic and Christian traditions, Humanism, and Earth centered spiritualities.
These sources are rich with texts about peace. From the Jewish Scriptures we read in the Book of Micah, that what is required of us is “…to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God.” The Christian Scriptures tell us over and over again to love our neighbor as ourselves, and then, in three of the four Gospels, to turn the other cheek if we have been wronged. The humanist traditions are consistently centered in a message of ethical principles promoting peace, such as can be found in the writings of Humanist author Arthur Dobrin in “A Humanist Code of Ethics”:
“Do no harm to the earth, she is your mother.
Being is more important than having.
Never promote yourself at another’s expense.
Hold life sacred; treat it with reverence.
Allow each person the dignity of his or her labor.
Open your home to the wayfarer.
Be ready to receive your deepest dreams;
sometimes they are the speech of unblighted conscience.
Always make restitution to the ones you have harmed.
Never think less of yourself than you are.
Never think that you are more than another.”
And finally, Earth-centered religions are similarly primarily focused on peaceful relations. In their many forms, they celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature. In truth, all religions that support life also support peace, at least in principle. It’s the practice of peace that is mostly at issue. But there is such a huge distance between the religiously historical perspective of peace and the religious practice of it. Through the ages, religions have been among the primary agents for violence, from warfare among nations, to domestic cruelty and abuse. How can we turn to religious history then in order to promote peace in our lives and in the world?
While I don’t remember its source, I do remember an adage I heard at a young age that still makes sense to me now; “It is a poor student who blames the teacher’s limitations for their own shortcomings.” It’s similar to a thought attributed to Leonardo daVinci, “It is a poor student who does not exceed his teacher.”
We have been left many valuable tools for the work of peace by traditional religions and by others who have gone before us. The stakes are much higher now than they have ever been before; the welfare of the entire planet literally hangs in the balance. And I'm afraid I'm not exaggerating; the violence we are doing to our planet and its ramifications were in the news once again this week with the scientific report from the United Nations on global warming and its human causes. Every week lately, we hear more and more of the growing threat of the possibility of detonating nuclear weapons under or over Iran.
We are perilously close to the violent destruction of our planet. Blaming our teachers for what they have not done will not save our planet or help the causes of peace. We can choose to take up the tools they have left us and fashion new ones, if need be. We can do the work that is before us, or we can fail to answer this clarion call of our age. If there is to be a future for our planet, how will those who come after us describe the work we have done.
So this morning, I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about history. Instead I want to talk about now, and about us, and about the next steps toward peace, because I strongly believe that the first step in making peace, is making it within our own hearts. Modern-day, Buddhist holy man Tich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment, to
Appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
Peace is all around us – in the world and in nature – and within us – in our bodies and our spirits.
Once we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed.
It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.”
My only disagreement with Tich Nhat Hahn is in his last line, “It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.” I believe that it is a matter of both practice and faith – faithful practice. They are intertwined; either of them can lead to the other and they are dependent on each other. To practice we need to have strong faith, and to have faith we need good practice.
We can't create peace in the world by developing a model of the way things ought to be, however benevolent we might imagine our ideas or ourselves to be, and then demanding that the world comply with our vision. We create peace by finding it in our hearts, by practicing it in our lives and then by sharing it with the world.
How do we find peace in our hearts? “To live in the present moment is a miracle.” We have to learn to accept who we are, if we are to learn how to accept others. The human condition, as is witnessed every moment around us, is a far cry from perfection. And yet we live in a world that holds out expectations of perfection – impossible though they are. Anything, anyone less than perfect is culturally, commercially deemed as being of less value. Underneath it all, we all feel incomplete. From the time of our births, when we leave the “Universal Mother,” which our own mothers represent symbolically and physically, we feel and experience incompleteness. And that’s because individually we are incomplete. We are a part of something larger.
Often Westerners attempting to understand Eastern thought, think that Buddhism teaches us that we don’t really exist individually at all, that our being is an illusion, and that only when we see the folly of self-existence, can we see others around us and our connections with them. The point is, if we don’t exist, neither do they. The point is we do exist, but not as complete independent units. We exist as parts of the larger whole. As Unitarian Universalists we, “…affirm and promote the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.” In accepting who we are, we need to let go of ideas of individual perfection and completion and come to terms with our limitations, our interdependence and reliance on one another and the planet, and the spirit that binds us together.
I know from so many of my conversations with you, in groups or individually, that we spend so much of our life-energy striving to be complete, fully independent, to be in control. Intellectually, we would never say that we should be perfect, but something in our emotional makeup seems to strive for it endlessly. We often feel we will be “found out,” that our facades will be broken down to expose our true selves. And then what would happen! This is not a culture that encourages us to expose our true selves. My hope is that this congregation provides some kind of counter-cultural haven from that larger culture.
Do we really take that first step toward peace, before we’re willing to allow those personal expectations of control and perfection to be annihilated? Once we let go of the need for perfection, then we begin to find peace. Redemption – being at peace or on the path towards it – comes when we realize that we are a part of something much larger than ourselves, part of each other and the planet, part of the mystery that is the universe.
Whatever there is of perfection, it does not lie in the individual but in that larger mystery. The mystery holds us, treasures us, supports us and accepts us. We are a precious part of that whole. And when we look to find peace in our hearts, we are guided in our search towards that mysterious largeness, that source of our being, which can be the source of our faith and thus of peace.
One of the more anti-peaceful pieces of our American culture is one that many of us here participate in – the lesson we teach our children about, “Don’t ever trust a stranger.” Our regrettable war in Iraq is probably the greatest manifestation of that misbegotten message. It was an easy accomplishment to get Americans whipped into a frenzy of fear, fear of the other, fear of the stranger. And so rather than attempt to annihilate our fear of the unknown, we strike out to try to destroy our enemy, and they us.
The lesson to never trust a stranger has served no one well. We don’t want to teach our kids to be stupid and unsafe, and we don’t have to. They can learn to be cautious without being controlled by their fear. We can learn to be cautious without being controlled by our fear. The stranger is so often the messenger of the mystery, the bearer of gifts. Sufi mystic poet Rumi, much like the Humanist, Arthur Drobin, suggests that we, “Open our home to the wayfarer.” Rumi wrote, The Guest House:
“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.”
This is a pretty incredible testament of faith. It's a faith that, whatever comes, it can be the source of great learning and of even greater fulfillment. It's not about being defensive and the perceived need to protect ourselves from what we do not know. It's not about being in control of everything or attempting to eliminate hardships from our lives. It's about recognizing one's place in the larger, mysterious stream of life; it's about recognizing that place as valid and valuable and ultimately redeeming. It's about having faith in our own vulnerability, letting go of the fantasy of control, allowing us to grow more fully into our lives and into the world. It's about having faith that, even when we are sore afraid, we are still capable of acting out of our humanity and not out of our inhumanity.
It's about having faith that, no matter how demanding our society might be of us to operate within a culture of consumption and fear, that the goal of peace will warrant what ever dues we might have to pay in our pursuit of it. Our culture does not reward its peacemakers, but that does not excuse us from heeding the call for peace. And the price society extorts can sometimes be very high.
Many years ago, during the Vietnam War, as I've told you a number of times, I became a Conscientious Objector. You might correctly imagine some of the social, political and institutional scorn that I received for having made such a statement of my life. You might imagine, as it did happen, that I lost my job. And as I was being fired by the way my boss said, "Why don't you just go back to Russia!"
I don't suspect though, that any of you could imagine my mother's response to my becoming a Conscientious Objector. The nation was torn apart by that earlier, unholy conflict, and my brother had only recently returned home from a year of duty in Vietnam. My mother looked at me with bitterness in her eyes and in her voice and simply said, "I'd rather see you dead in a uniform than this." It took me a long time to forgive her; I know it took her a long time to forgive herself, as well.
The point is that we don't live in a culture that invites us to be deeply in touch with our humanity, let alone be in touch with the humanity of others. In fact, our culture punishes us for those efforts. And so it comes down to faith and practice. We need to be all the more committed to our faith in ourselves, in each other, and thus in peace. We need to be all the more committed to our practice of peace, if we are going to bring it about. We're going to have to be willing to be all the more vulnerable, if we are going to be agents of the changes our world so desperately needs.
We are going to have to allow ourselves to move from our fear to our faith – from the fear of what ever might be out there that threatens us, or our fear that we just don't have what it takes inside to live the life of spiritual integrity; to the faith that there is nothing out there that can strip us of our humanity, and to faith in ourselves and each other, that we are acceptable, that we are enough, that we are a part of a wholeness that wants wholeness for us, and peace and love, too. And a faith that we are capable of doing what we must so that it might be so. We have only one life, to what end are we willing to live it?
Birth is a beginning and death a destination, and in the course of our lifetimes we are capable of moving from fear to faith. We are capable of loving our neighbor as ourselves. We are capable of turning the other cheek. We are capable of doing justice, of loving kindness, and of walking humbly with our God. We are capable of welcoming the wayfarer, the unexpected visitor. We are capable of living in the miracle of this present moment, of touching the peace that is within our being and giving greater birth to it in the world.
As we learn to touch this peace, we will be healed and transformed. We will be healers and transformers. It is a matter of faith, and it is a matter of practice. May it be our faith and our practice.
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