“The Future Is Calling”
A Sermon for October Focus Month:
Growing Our Roots and Branches
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
October 7, 2007
RESPONSIVE READING:
"It Matters What We Believe," by Sophia Lyon Fahs
Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.
Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.
Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.
Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.
Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.
Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.
Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one’s own direction.
Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.
Some beliefs weaken a person’s selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.
Other beliefs nurture self confidence and enrich feelings of personal worth.
Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.
Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.
READINGS:
The first reading is from the Christian text, The Book of Matthew, Chapter 12:
That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears* listen!’
Our second reading is from the Taoist text, from the Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu, Chapter 58, translated by Stan Rosenthal:
The actions of the sage are sharp,
but they are never cutting,
they are pointed, though never piercing,
they are straightforward, not contrived,
and not without restraint,
brilliant but not blinding.
This is the action of the sage,
because the sage is aware
that where happiness exists,
there is also misery and strife;
that where honesty may be found,
there is occasion for dishonesty,
and that [people] may be beguiled.
The sage knows that no-one can foretell
just what the future holds.
SERMON:
Ed Ayers, editor of World Watch magazine, wrote a book, God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future. The book, published in 1999, begins with the recounting of an incident that took place in Australia a little over two hundred years ago. For millennia, the Aborigines there used small canoes for fishing just off the eastern coast of the continent. They had no contact with white people until April 29, 1792, when the British ship, Endeavor, under Captain James Cook, sailed into a bay encountering a group of unsuspecting natives. It was the first known contact between Australians and Europeans. A Botanist, James Banks, was a passenger on the ship who made a detailed entry into his journal describing the encounter.
One might think that this would have been an astonishing event for the natives. An enormous structure, larger than anything they'd ever seen, came sailing right into their midst. Banks wrote, "…The Australians took no notice. They displayed neither fear nor interest and went on fishing."
Historian Robert Hughes speculates that the ship was something so huge, complex, and unfamiliar as to defy the native's understanding. It's unlikely that there was anything in their experience – ever – to make them or help them to see that it was a boat.
In fact, when the Europeans saw that there was no hostile response to their arrival, they lowered landing boats and began rowing ashore. That's when the natives recognized something they were familiar with. Most of the Aborigines bolted into the trees except for two that stood their ground, shouting at the invaders.
The warning to us is that we, too, are facing a threat so enormous, so beyond our previous experience, so alien that we are unable to have any regard for its consequences. We don't hardly recognize the destruction of our environment as a threat. Since the book was published eight years ago, we have come to recognize somewhat more clearly what is at stake. Still though, we are more like the two Aborigines who stood to fight – shaking our spears and demanding that global warming reverse itself! Regardless of what we know or not regarding the environment, we have been blind to the threat that we ourselves have created.
But I’m not really here this morning to talk about the endangered ecology of our planet. I surely don’t want to dismiss that endangerment because it is indeed real and it’s been dismissed for far too long. I would like for us to view it though, within an even larger context of complications and perils which humanity places on itself and the planet. I’d like for us to note religious implications and participation in promoting such dangers, and to recognize how our liberal religious message might be especially needed today to bring balance into a conversation that has somehow slid radically to the right of the religious spectrum, allowing a self-serving fundamentalism to take the place of a perhaps overly tired and worn orthodoxy.
This month we will be focusing on growing – Growing Our Roots and Branches – and this morning we are looking to see just how the future is calling us to grow our faith now. So I should probably begin by saying a few words about the idea of growth altogether.
We know from our observations in the universe, in the world, and in our own lives that all things and all beings are in a constant state of change. They’re either growing – expanding, or dying – contracting. We can’t make things grow. But we can influence the conditions that either encourage life or encourage death. Like the parable of the seeds in the Book of Matthew – the ones that fall by the wayside don’t fare very well. But the ones that fall on fertile ground sprout and grow and multiply. We don’t get to choose what lives or dies, but we do get to choose the ground on which we wish to plant our seeds. We get to choose what we will nourish or not. In the end, the great mystery of life steps in and either life or death follows; call it grace or whatever you will. In the meantime we live our lives – not in control of things – but by investing our faith and our life energy in nourishing those things, those beings and experiences that we love and that give our lives meaning. So as we talk about growth today and in the weeks ahead, I’ll hope you are able to weigh the value of such an investment in terms of your own life, the life of this congregation, and of the world and its future.
That said I should probably say a word about the risks of investing in a future orientation. Through the ages, religion has been used by those in power to promote later rewards – pie in the sky. As Unitarian Universalists our orientation more typically recognizes that if something is authentically good for this moment, it is good for the future as well. In a sermon just a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that the religious/spiritual experience provides us with the ability to find and make meaning in our lives, often through stories that connect us to the past and point toward the future in a way that makes the present always at the crux of spiritual experience and significance.
There are a couple of thoughts that were expressed by John F. Kennedy that speak of the future in ways that tie it to the spiritual experience and significance of the present, in ways that are both inspiring and cautionary. He wrote:
“Ideals are like stars. You will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but the seafaring [person] who follows the waters follows the stars, and if you choose them as your guides, you can reach your destiny… The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need [persons] who can dream of things that never were.”
We don’t get to create the future. But rest assured that we are participants in that creation. What we choose to nourish or not to nourish may not control the outcome, but it will influence that outcome. And more, in the end what we choose to nourish or not nourish, to what extent we choose to invest our life’s energy, those are the elements that make up the content, make up the stories and the histories of our lives.
The brilliant writer Annie Dillard wrote, “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by… The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.” So, let our aim be for good lives, dedicated lives. Let us invest with our whole hearts. And let us seek to number ourselves, not with the apathetic or the cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities, as President Kennedy suggested, but among the world’s great dreamers. There is a very different kind of future than the one that our present seems to be pointing toward, that needs to be dreamt, aspired to, and made real. There is too much at stake for us to sit quietly by.
In our Responsive Reading this morning Sophia Lyon Fahs wrote, “Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness and the feeling of being especially privileged…separating saved from unsaved, friends from enemies.” These very kinds of religious beliefs, held by fundamentalists of every stripe around the world do not represent the religious impulse that is natural, that is uplifting, that is pursued by the majority of the human race. And though they may be held only by a minority, but they have certainly pushed their way to the center stage of the world theater. As a result that theater has become more and more a theater of war, and not fundamentalist vs. fundamentalist. It is every individual faction of fundamentalism against everyone else, against the environment and against the idea that there are any other ideas of moral merit or value.
I have to tell you it was a very frightening experience that I mentioned earlier in the children’s story, when last Sunday afternoon my wife Judy and I were down the shore walking along the beach. I have to admit I was a little taken aback when we first came upon the very young orthodox religious mother and father obviously in their early 30’s with their ten children in tow. Wow, I thought, we had our hands full with three kids. And even though I was one of ten children growing up, I can’t imagine parenting ten! And it really was only wonderment that I held for this family until we encountered them again on our return walk.
They were all gathered on a stairway that we needed to climb to get to the parking lot. And as we were passing just along the side of them, one of the boys, probably eight or ten years old, jumped up in amazement and pointing at a kite flying high over the beach exclaimed, “Look at the kite! Look at the beautiful kite!”
Rarely one to hold my thoughts in check, I immediately responded to him, “Isn’t it pretty and isn’t this just a perfect day for kite flying!” What happened next terrified me deeply. As he turned to look at me, the expression of awe on the boy’s face melted and morphed into one of disdain and contempt. “Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children’s days with fears of unknown calamities.”
What his expression communicated to me was that I had violated some kind of boundary by addressing him. He was with his entire family so I posed no imminent threat of abduction or physical harm. The looks that quickly came from other family members confirmed that, while they were on a public beach, they had no intention of having a public experience. Some things became painfully clear. I was in their eyes profane, something of an infidel. The children had been carefully taught not to trust outsiders and certainly not to appreciate them. In our language there was no interest or need by anyone in the family to affirm and promote any inherent worth and dignity in me or anyone outside of the walled garden of their religious beliefs. Ironically, his inherent worth and dignity is what I had tried to communicate to the boy.
Something else occurred to me that I found disturbing. I’ve always been curious about the large number of children spawned by the orthodox sects of many religions. Part of it I’m sure is to keep the sects from dying out. But part of it, I think, is to maintain a viable mass, so as to have strength in numbers to protect the group from the invasion of others – others whom their beliefs have encouraged them to disdain, vilify and even dehumanize. I recognize that the experience I had was not a violent one. It was disturbing though. And it’s easy from what did occur, to see the short distance between fundamentalist orthodoxy and fear driven, power fueled extremism. It’s easy to see how exclusion does indeed lead to violence.
I’ll tell you what – I thank God I’m a Unitarian Universalist! I’m thankful that I have found a religious tradition that believes in the unity of all things; that believes in the human spirit and does not despise it. I’m thankful that I have found a religion that promotes beliefs that are expansive and lead the way to wider sympathies, promoting bonds in a world community, where sincere differences are seen to beautify the pattern, opening wide the gateways of confining garden walls, providing Vistas for exploration, nurturing self-confidence and enriching personal worth, growing with the thrust of life.
I thank goodness I am a Unitarian Universalist, but I know it’s not enough to be merely thankful. I have to share this religious message with a world that is desperate for it. I don’t need to – none of us need to – push this liberal religious faith on anyone else. But folks, we got to let people know it’s here. We’ve got to let people know we are here.
There are other religious messages out there, messages that lure people with the notion or the feeling of being saved, of being insulated, of being superior. There are religious messages out there that convince people that they can have a special relationship with a deity, who in turn empowers them with special rights of moral authority and dominion. Our religious message of a belief in the unity of all things, the interdependence and connectedness of all things, and the salvation of all things and all people needs to be voiced in the religious marketplace in order to provide some balance in a conversation that, as we move into the future, appears to be getting crazier and crazier.
Like our name says, we are Unitarian Universalist. We believe in the unity of all things. From the inherent worth and dignity of every person to the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part, we believe in the unity of all things.
It is that unity which is at our very core; it is that unity which reaches to our furthest periphery. We don’t believe in the unity of all things as doctrine or dogma – not because anyone has instructed us to believe it. We believe in the unity of all things because our reason, our experience, our connections, our intelligence, our intuition, our faith tells us that each of us, that everyone one of us, that everything is part of everything else. We might understand that unity in different ways; we might express our relationships with it in different ways.
Still, for us unity is at the center, calling us to a life of reverence, of faith and of hope, of love and of service. It calls us to do our part—during our lifetimes – to promote the Spirit of Life, as it moves forward through the ages.
If we are going to talk seriously about doing our part in trying to transform the future, about transforming the larger community and this world, we need to be willing to increase our investment – in the transformation of our own lives and of this religious community. We know there are religions out there, only too willing to tell people what’s right and wrong. Mostly what is right according to them, is what they think is right. And mostly what is wrong according to them, is what they don’t think. To be right, you just have to sign up. Of course you have to abandon much of your humanity and adopt someone else’s idea of what it means to be human. And in the process the world’s resources become further depleted, our planet is made more fragile, whole segments of humanity are put at risk and our most prized human characteristic – love – is boundaried and regulated.
If the church community we are becoming is indeed to be transforming and transformative, we will need to create here, within this sacred community, foundations of unity that include and embrace a diversity of class, race, ethnicity, gender identity and orientation, various levels of ability, and those of all the other traditionally marginalized groups. We will need to invite others of all diverse groups to come and become a part of who we are becoming. And we will need to hold ourselves accountable to those groups.
If we want to transform this congregation as it moves into the future, it means that we will share our story and extend our invitation to others who are in search of open, not walled gardens. And then perhaps those who hide or throw rocks from behind closed garden walls might even come out to see the beauty and strength of a religious way that embraces the other, beyond fear and with compassion. They might emerge, the stories of their past left in tact, but their need for exclusion left behind as a result of new experiences that allow new understandings of what it means to be partners in creating the common good in the context of a global village.
The future is calling. We don’t get to determine that future, but we do get to choose how we will participate in its formation; we get to choose what we will nourish and what we will not. The religious dialogue in the public square is straining to hear our voice. We need to be careful not to create yet another fundamentalism. There are many varying religious traditions that with us encourage ethical and spiritual life; that confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love. Ours is not, by a long shot the only voice that can say what needs to be said. But it is surely one, and we can ill afford to merely talk only amongst ourselves. The world can ill afford it.
The same spiritual impulse that calls us to the religious community of Unitarian Universalism, calls us as well to share what we’ve found with that needy world. The future calls us to grow Unitarian Universalism – both here and in the world. It’s vital for us to grow our congregations until they’re bursting at the seams. The world is longing for a more loving way to be, and for my money and for my life’s energy, Unitarian Universalism is the best hope that we, who are here, have at getting there.
If God is anything, God is love. And as Martin Luther King, Jr. told us, “he cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Things do not stay the same. They change by growing or dying. May our choice be for nourishing our growth, growing our roots and our branches, our spiritual lives, our congregation, and our hope for a more healthful, more faithful and a more loving world. The future is calling.
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