"The Religions of Our
Forebears:
The Religions of Our Lives"
A Sermon for New Member Sunday
By Rev. Charles Blustein Ortman,
March 1, 2009
INSTALLATION OF NEW MEMBERS:
Introductory Remarks:
New member installation is a special and rewarding time in the life
of the congregation. It's good for the new members to be recognized
and welcomed, and important for the older members to have the opportunity
to receive you into this community that together, we are becoming.
Together we will aspire to be: a religious community where trust
is in the potential, which resides in individuals and in the holy
process which works among people through caring and honest sharing
of perspectives; whose minds and hearts are opening to the deeper
spiritual significance of the ancient symbols, stories and texts;
who feel that there are many paths into the depths of the mystery
in which our lives are set, even as they seek the one path most
personally significant for them; who wish to walk in one company
together-for mutual support and benefit and toward the greater glory.
While there is much commonality in what brings many of us to this
faith community, our newcomers each arrive with a unique history
and with a wealth of individual gifts. Today, as these individuals
make their membership public, I would remind us all that joining
a Unitarian Universalist congregation may seem easy because all
you have to do is sign the book. But, be assured, it is a most demanding
step.
Joining the congregation is a covenant really. We covenant with
one another to be our best selves and to hold each other in high
expectation, to engage in life fully and lovingly - loving ourselves,
one another and the world. When you sign the membership book, you
make a promise, a promise that may sound simple-it should sound
simple-but which, if you "keep covenant," brings you into
intimate companionship with others who have also promised to live
with all the integrity you and they can together muster, in all
the years of your lives."
And so we ask, as you sign this book, to covenant with us and to
submit to the most rigorous authority in religious and spiritual
matters-the authority of your own mind, heart, and conscience. We
ask that you sacrifice the security of unchallenged points of view,
and that you be open to change and growth. We ask that you be restless
in the pursuit of human rights, social justice, and world peace.
We ask you to remember that this is a community of aspiration, not
a congregation that has it all figured out. Part of being human
is the experience of failure, and part of being in religious community
is being there-to pick each other up when we have stumbled. And
we ask that you commit yourself to the service of this congregation
by your participation in it - with your love, and with your resources:
your talents, time and energies, your opinions, criticisms, and
your hopes. And more, we ask you to financially support this bold
religious venture. Together, we can continue to build a free religious
community in Montclair and in northern Essex County.
We know that you were attracted to this congregation because you
were already supportive of many of the things that it stands for.
And we know that you are volunteering to join with us because these
impulses and goals fit well with who you are already. We are happy
to welcome you into the rich heritage of this congregation which
is now in its 111th year; into the rich heritage of our denominational
organizations which date back nearly 200 years; into the tradition
of heresy (a word that comes from a Greek root meaning to choose),
a tradition that goes back some two thousand years; and into the
heritage of a set of religious values that goes all the way back
to the earliest days of human awareness. May your membership here
be filled with meaning.
READINGS:
Our first ancient reading this morning comes from a translation
of the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20:
1. I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other gods before
me; nor shall you make for yourself false idols;
2. You shall not take the name of your God in vain;
3. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy;
4. Honor your father and mother;
5. You shall not murder;
6. You shall not commit adultery;
7. You shall not steal;
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor;
9. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife;
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's goods.
Our second ancient reading is from the Book of Matthew, Chapter
22:
…and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
'Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?' He said
to him, ' "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the
greatest and first command-ment. And a second is like it: "You
shall love your neighbour as yourself." On these two com-mandments
are suspended all the law and the prophets.'
Our third reading is the list of the Seven Principles covenanted
to by the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association:
We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
covenant to affirm and promote:
" The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
" Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
" Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual
growth in our congregations;
" A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
" The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process
within our congregations and in society at large;
" The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice
for all;
" Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which
we are a part.
SERMON:
I want to begin with just a word of appreciation. And that word
is of course, thank you. Even though I was actually here at the
"U" for most of the month of February, because my presence
here in the pulpit has been, let's say, somewhat sporadic, it's
felt like forever since we've had one of these little chats together.
So my thank you is first, for the license you provided me, to be
where I needed to be, surrounding the death of my father-in-law.
It was good to be in Chicago, knowing that I had more than just
your blessing for being there; I had your support.
The second part of my thank you is not unrelated to the first.
It is for your willingness not to let my absence matter so much
in the life of our religious community. I suspect the size of our
new member group coming through this morning is testimony of your
willingness to step in and share our ministry. Leaders led. Doobies
did. Carers cared. And our mission of transformation has remained
intact, at the center of all the ministries that all of you have
participated in.
Thank you for being the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at
Montclair. I'm not thanking you for being perfect. So you needn't
feel like a fraud, I'm thanking you for your efforts towards healing,
and community, and service that you have made. Like I said earlier,
we don't have it all figured out here. But we are getting better
and better at picking ourselves and one another up along the way.
Many of you know, because too many of you have also been touched
by the several other deaths that have been part of my experience,
a part of the congregation's experience, over these past six weeks.
Our community has had a very close-up view of mortality. My colleague,
Forest Church from across the river at All Souls UU Congregation
on the Upper East Side, who by the way is himself currently dying
of cancer, noted some time ago that, "Religion is the human
response to being alive and having to die." I think it surely
is.
We all know that we're only here for a while. Some religions attempt
to explain what might have come before birth and what might come
after. But all religions try to provide a way of finding and making
meaning with the time that we do have here. Religion often plays
an important role at and immediately following the time of death.
Somehow though, I have to think that religion can be more comforting,
if it has also played a significant role in our lives, while we
are living, long before the experience of death begins.
Over these past few weeks, connecting with several of the grieving
families involved in this mysterious and heavy-hearted passage,
I've had a significant opportunity to once again engage in and from
some of the more orthodox religious traditions that many of us came
out of. So, I've been a part of and have even led gatherings and
services that have had strong Jewish, Catholic, Protestant and Humanistic
elements. While ours is its own distinctive tradition, many of us
here bring valuable experiences from those earlier associations
and practices - experiences that can help many of us in engaging
our spiritual and religious sensibilities. Indeed Unitarianism and
Universalism both came out of those very same origins.
What makes us different, not necessarily better, but different?
One thing is that we tend not to draw exclusively from any one particular
tradition or story. Instead, we cast our nets widely, out into the
many streams of religious thought, and we reel in that which shores
up our foundations and leads us to the next thought or experience
that gives us access the very religious practices of faith, hope
and love, the work of justice and compassion, the adventure of growing
our souls, the very religious practices of transformation.
With families in several settings over these past weeks, I have
whispered the Bharoocha's, said the Lord's Prayer - with both Catholic
and Protestant endings respectively, and have invoked Holy Mother
the Earth. And in them all, I have witnessed the survivors who,
through the rituals and the words, have dared to begin to say farewell;
have dared to begin to take the next steps back into their new lives,
lives that will now be re-formed, around a memory, in place of where
a live person recently existed. I have seen family members begin
the religious quest of balancing once again their lives within the
tension of the ONE and the MANY.
We don't leave behind the religions of our forebears, the religions
of our pasts. We bring them along. To some significant extent, we
have been molded and sculpted by those traditions. And so we bring
them along, and where we must, we modify and mollify them. We deny
in part, perhaps, and we accept in part, what we have taken from
them. And because these are our lives, for which we are responsible
- responsible for the actions we take or don't take, and for the
meanings we make, responsible for bitterness we refuse to relinquish,
as well as for the forgiveness we do share - because these are our
lives for which we are responsible, we have to somehow learn to
respond to our experiences in them by growing through them, growing
our souls through them. And so we must grow our religions through
them, too.
I've been thinking about the religious codes, found in scriptures,
which have been considered sacred through the ages. These codes
have served as the backbones of religious traditions through time.
They really provide a theological account of the religious quest
to promote balance within the dynamic dance of the ONE and the MANY.
The first code in the Judeo-Christian religious stream was, "Do
not eat that apple!" Pretty simple authoritarian approach,
really. It was mostly about THE ONE. "I'm God; you're not.
I have the power; you don't. I have the knowledge; you can't handle
it. Whoops! You did have the power to choose? You did have the power
to eat that apple, didn't you?! I guess you do have some knowledge
now; I hope you can handle it."
Then, what? About two thousand years later a new code emerges.
It was the Ten Commandments. What a lot of people don't realize,
what I had no idea of until I studied them in seminary, is that
the Ten Commandments are completely modeled on the Suzerain Treaties
of that ancient age in the Middle-East. A new Suzerain, sort of
an emperor, would move in to an area, take over and impose a treaty.
The Suzerain treaties always had two parts. The first part specified
what the subjects owed to the Suzerain - loyalty, fidelity, homage,
etc. "I am the Lord thy God, I shalt not have strange gods
before me." That sort of thing.
Then the second part of the treaty was about how the subjects were
to treat each other. There was to be no murder, theft, lying, adultery
- not even any coveting! And in an orderly society, parents were
to be honored by their children. This new religious code, based
on the politics of the day, was actually about both THE ONE and
THE MANY.
It was really quite a departure from the first code. It didn't
just demand recognition and homage of the supreme power or deity.
It recognized the significance of human relationships. And though
it did so in the negative - i.e. "Thou shalt not" statements
- it codified the expectation of decency and civility among the
people. I've got to wonder, if when Moses brought the tablets down
from the mountainside, if he was met by nay-sayers who responded,
"Whoa! This is about me, and God, and the apple. Don't start
talking to me about Schlomo over here and the designs I might have
for his new fatted heifer! Change is always so hard.
So another two or three thousand years pass. Another mega-religious
figure comes along with still a new code. Jesus says, "God
is love, so love God with every speck of who and what you are. And
on top of that, love your neighbor in the same way, even in the
same way you love yourself."
This too was about a supreme-being and the individual's relationship
with that supreme-being. But more, it was about human to human relationships.
Here they were elevated much higher than they had been. Now they
were equated in importance with and even a part of a person's relationship
with his or her creator. The negativity was gone. It was not about
what not to do, but about what one ought to do. It promoted behavior
instead of forbidding it.
So another thousand, two thousand years pass by. Another code,
our code, our Unitarian Universalist covenant comes into being at
a General Assembly in 1961. It does not forsake those codes that
preceded it. But like each of them, it builds upon what was there
before. It too, recognizes the religious tension between THE ONE
and THE MANY. It acknowledges that the ONE might be known by many
names and through many differing experiences of it. And it identifies
that each of us - THE MANY, the all-that-is - is a part of that
oneness.
This new code, our Unitarian Universalist code, was not handed
down from on high. Like the other codes, it was inspired by the
divinely human experience of the religious impulse that urges us
to seek and create wholeness within the brokenness and the separation,
which is the human condition. But unlike the other codes, it evolved
through a democratic process that included a shared religious vision
that was born out of many diverse backgrounds and experiences.
It embraces the ONE by affirming and promoting the inherent worth
and dignity of every person. It encompasses the MANY, the whole
by affirming and promoting respect for the interdependent web of
existence of which we are a part. It does not matter if we hold
on to aspects of the codes that came before. In fact, it is a precious
gift if we can hold them. It does matter though, that we evolve
and transform, that we grow and that we grow our religion along
with us, so that we - so that it - might pay greater attention to
our lives, and so that we might have greater intention in our service
to our spirits, to those of our loved ones, to the world around
us, and to all-that-is.
D.H. Lawrence once wrote, "A person has no religion who has
not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping
it, and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but
must always be undergoing modification." I suspect this is
as true for us collectively as it is individually.
Growing means learning and the need to learn means that we don't
already have all the answers. The fact that a believer might be
happier than a skeptic, George Bernard Shaw once noted, "is
no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier
than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous
quality."
"Religion is the human response to being alive and having
to die." (Forest Church) So a primary task of religion then,
is to provide comfort. We come here seeking comfort. We might all
have different, very well developed ideas, beliefs and theories
about what was before life and about what waits or does not wait
for us afterwards. But the truth is, we can't know those things,
even though we can and may even need to have beliefs about them.
We're here because we need religion.
One religious response could be to impart to us the truth, supplying
us with answers to these unfathomable questions. Or religion, the
communal quest of the spiritual path, can respond by providing us
with the experience and the comfort of community, so that we might
be in good company with kindred spirits, while we contemplate the
mysteries, while we seek to answer the questions about our lives.
Religion can provide us with questions that we might be more capable
of answering in the context of community:
Who or what am I in relationship to all-that-is?
How can I be in right relationship with others?
How can I be in right relationship with this planet?
What is the code that will provide value and give meaning to my
life?
How can I seek a sense of wholeness with others who also walk in
pain and suffering?
Algernon Black wrote:
"Why not let people differ about their answers to the great
mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one's own way to the highest,
to one's own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one's ideal of life.
Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty
to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature
and dedication."
We are the recipients of all the religious thought that has preceded
us on this planet. Some of that thought has gotten us into considerable
trouble over the aeons. Some of it though, some of it has stood
us very, very well. We are the heirs of all the religions of our
forebears.
And now it is up to us to fashion, to mold and to claim the religion
of our lives. And that is what we come here to do. Not to be handed
the answers, but to join with others in living in the questions.
Not to be told what not to do, but to have a light shine on what
is possible. Not to be told that we are evil, but to be encouraged
to embrace life, even in all its suffering, with gratitude for this
incredible gift of being.
Whatever we might claim the religion of our lives to be, may it
ever be that which connects us each - THE ONE - with all-that- is
- THE MANY.
May it put us in touch with the larger rhythms and harmonies of
the universe.
May it help us to be aware of the beauty of a creation that continually
unfolds.
May it encourage us as servants of the earth upon which our existence
depends.
May it implore us to recognize and serve our neighbors - every man,
woman and child on this planet.
May it enable us to embrace this and every precious moment as a
sacred occasion, in which lies the potential for redeeming suffering
with joy.
May it nurture us so that we might nurture bridges of intimacy and
compassion that are global and inclusive.
And may it ever remind us that to be human is to be in a state of
process: to live, to love, each moment, and in that way, never to
die. (From "May it…" greatly adapted by CBO from
a prayer by David Rankin.)
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