To Come Alive

August 31, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

When we are tempted to get carried away with how special we are – so much more special than everyone else – let us remember that the words “humanity” and “humility” have the same root.

If a self-absorbed arrogance blocks us from growing into our fuller humanity, we may have better luck along the path of a more selfless humility that leaves room for the larger world to find its way into us.

Wherever we build walls of self-righteousness, we exclude ourselves from participating in a world that is larger and usually more blessed than all our little fossilized certainties.

One of the most profound ironies of life is the fact that we don’t become bigger by exalting ourselves, but by finding our calling as small parts of a much larger reality.

Another of life’s delicious ironies is that humility enlarges us more than hubris, embracing differences makes us better people than demanding similarity, just as the willingness to understand another shows that we are more highly evolved than the eagerness to judge them.

We pray for greater humility, understanding and compassion. For those are among the spiritual vulnerabilities that truly are more powerful than tight little strengths.

Our world desperately needs people who can become more fully human. We pray for the humility to become one of them. Amen.

SERMON: To Come Alive

We gather here to pursue the promises of honest religion: to come alive, to seek truth, and to heal our world. We’re here in search of that special kind of light that has always been at the center of nearly all religions. It is the light that lives in words like enlightenment, spiritual illumination, and that halo that medieval painters used to put around the heads of all the saints. One of religion’s two most enduring questions is “Where are you hurting?” The other is who and what is that religious light, that religious truth, meant to serve? And those two questions are deeply intertwined.

Most of the sermons this fall are planned to help us all find a more informed and more commanding connection to our several religious traditions. We are religious liberals, our style of worship here has been heavily influenced by the Protestant Reformation (whether we’re Christians or not), and some of our most important beliefs – of which you may not even be aware – have been shaped by the best Unitarian thinkers of the early 19th century. Our religious heritage has several levels, and I think you will resonate with each of them. They are all like successive incarnations of the spirit of honest religion, the spirit of liberal and liberating religion, the search for the kind of truth that makes us come more alive, that helps us make ourselves and our world more integrated and authentic. That’s the gift of life that all religions are meant to offer, and at its best I think liberal religion does it best of all.

I’ve always like etymology, the study of the origin of words, because it can show us deeper meanings of ordinary words that we might otherwise overlook. For instance, the root of the word “liberal” is also the root of words like liberation and liberty, and it means “free.” In religion, it means free from the constraints of anyone’s orthodoxies, creeds, or salvation schemes that include them but not you. I”m not knocking salvation. It comes from Latin words meaning “to save,” but it’s also the root of our word “salve” – it’s about a healthy kind of wholeness. There is a salvation scheme that transcends all religions, that most of the wisdom literature in the world points to, that is as true and life-giving today as it was 4,000 years ago, in the first incarnation of the liberal spirit that we know of.

Today, I want to give you one kind of introduction to honest religion, liberal religion, and what it has involved since its first known appearance at the dawn of history. This is very broad, like flying over a continent pointing out what shows from six miles up. We’ll revisit some of these themes throughout the fall, both in sermons and in the adult education class our ministerial intern Brian Ferguson will be leading on Monday nights starting September 22nd. This is a class where you can read and hear what the influential Unitarian and Universalist thinkers wrote in the early 19th century. It’s a little sobering to realize that students preparing for the Unitarian ministry only have to read one essay each by a total of just three Unitarian writers, the most recent one dating to 1841. That sounds pretty paltry, and in some ways it is. But Unitarian thinkers have not contributed much of anything to mainstream Christian thought since then, because they have not been interested in mainstream Christian thought since then. But the new perspectives they brought in a century and a half ago are still profound, still life-giving, and still absolutely essential parts of how almost everyone here understands religion. This may surprise you, like that Voltaire character who was surprised late in life to learn that all his life he had been speaking prose, but it’s true. So one theme for this fall will be learning what it means to be both a liberal and a religious liberal.

How old is this spirit of honest religion, this spirit of liberal religion? It’s at least 4,700 years old, which makes it almost prehistoric. It is found in the oldest story in the world, the story of Gilgamesh, a real-life ruler who lived about 2750 BC, which makes it older than the Bible, older than the earliest Hindu writings, and more than 1500 years older than the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Gilgamesh story is also the source of the Flood story in the Bible, and the source of the myth about Noah and his ark. I’ve done a whole sermon on the Gilgamesh epic, and don’t want to repeat it except to show how powerfully it illustrates the spirit of liberal religion, that quest for the kind of light that is at the heart of spiritual illumination and religious enlightenment.

Those who wrote the story more than four millennia ago described their age as the “modern” age, which sounds impossible, when they didn’t even have wi-fi or TV dinners. But writing had just been invented right there in Sumeria, a hundred years earlier, so they saw all the pre-literate people as ancient, and themselves as modern. They knew writing had changed the world forever, for now history was born, and the past could always be present as never before. It gave them a kind of synoptic view of history that pre-literate people couldn’t have, so they saw themselves – rightly – as modern. And as modern people, they had the audacity to ask whether the gods were still useful, and they decided the gods were no longer relevant. This didn’t frighten or depress them. Instead, Gilgamesh decided that the purpose of life is right here among us. It is about living well, loving friends and family, building and contributing things to the future, and being enlarged by the joy and fullness brought through music and the other arts, and the enthusiastic participation in life.

In other words, they decided, more than 4700 years ago, that the purpose of life is to seek the kind of truth that makes you come more fully alive, and to participate passionately in the many opportunities and blessings life offers. Even that long ago, they grew beyond being interested in some tricky way to live on, whether through an afterlife or a reincarnation. The Buddhists, who wouldn’t appear for another 2200 years, would have said it was the kind of truth that could awaken us from our illusions.

That’s the liberal spirit in its earliest known incarnation: the spirit that will question and challenge and shrug off anything that no longer gives us the kind of truth that makes us come more alive. It is a very courageous spirit. It is also very disturbing. Imagine that – simply deciding the gods are no longer useful, and shrugging them off! I think the Gilgamesh story went farther and more boldly than all of the Bible-based religions that hadn’t even evolved yet.

When they did evolve, when the ancient Hebrew tribes put together their notion of God by combining Yahweh and the Elohim gods (“Elohim” is plural), and borrowing from other religions, they put together a God from which, in some important ways, we are still suffering. What I mean by that is that biblical scholars are clear that Yahweh evolved originally from a tribal chief, and has always kept much of the authoritarian character of that ancient tribal chief. The covenant between that God and his people was based on an earlier Hittite treaty between a ruler and his subjects. That’s the covenant – which I’ll talk more about next week – that says “I’ll be your ruler and you will be my people. I’ll protect you if you obey, and punish you if you disobey.” That’s the attitude that still lets Western believers move way too effortlessly to persecuting or murdering those who believe differently. It’s been harder to shrug that God off as irrelevant, because its followers may kill you for it – as many martyrs throughout history have discovered the hard and painful way.

But this liberal spirit that ranks getting right with truth higher than getting right with God, and coming alive higher than coming to Jesus – this is a dangerous spirit in all times and places. It believes that “New occasions teach new duties,” and that “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” Those are the words of 19th century poet James Russell Lowell, but Gilgamesh walked that talk more than four thousand years before him.

When Martin Luther, who started the Protestant Reformation nearly five hundred years ago, reincarnated that ancient liberal spirit, he threw out five of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, and said that informed believers trumped uninformed popes. So you can’t be too surprised to learn that he had to hide out for over a year because the Church had a contract out on him – the same kind of contract that the Ayatollah Khomeini had out on the novelist Salman Rushdie when Khomeini said it was the religious duty of Muslims to kill Rushdie because he had insulted old beliefs.

The liberal spirit is about freeing the light, liberating the light from the little cages we keep building for it through our creeds, orthodoxies and rituals. The Unitarian church I served before coming here, in St. Paul, MN, has a wonderful version of this message engraved on the outside of their building, with a picture of birds flying – the bird is a nearly universal symbol of the spirit. The words were by one of their ministers from half a century ago (Wallace Robbins) and say, “We dare not fence the spirit”. We dare not fence the spirit! There is the spirit of liberal religion in six short words.

There is a kind of eternal game in religions, between the liberal spirit and the conservative enclosures that keep trying to limit the light to only their own comfort, to fence the boundless energy of the Holy Spirit into the confines of their parochial certainties, the limits of their current orthodoxies and creeds.

Now I”m not going to keep singing the praises of that liberal spirit without stopping to attack it – well, if you believe in the liberal spirit, you have to attack it. Because here we come up against the catch in all of this wonderful and arrogant talk about freedom. Because when you read it this way, this liberal stuff can sound misleadingly heroic. It can sound like the point of criticism and inquiry is simply to shatter whatever beliefs people have erected to help them through their lives, as though destroying is a higher calling than creating, as though merely knowing some truths is more important than coming alive. That’s the seduction that liberals must avoid if they’re to be religious liberals. For finally, religion isn’t about knowing the right facts; it’s about coming alive. It isn’t about knowing truths; it’s about living them. It isn’t about preaching peace; it is, as the Buddhists say, about becoming the peace that we want. And that is so much harder!

The liberal spirit says that if we mouth second-hand beliefs, we’re living someone else’s life, which means there’s nobody left to live our life. But the spirit of religion says that if our beliefs are only about us, only serve us and our kind of people, then we’re serving something too small to give us life, too partial to be a truth that can help us become more whole, too limited to heal either ourselves or our world.

Another way of putting this is to return to the words I used in the first paragraph of this sermon. All of religion – meaning all of healthy, honest and adequate religion – can be boiled down to two questions. Yes, this is sort of the Cliff Notes version of Religion 101, but at one level it really is this simple and clear.

The first question is, “Where are you hurting?” Half of honest religion is seeking a path to lead us beyond our existential discomfort, our spiritual ennui, the sense that our lives could somehow be “more” and the longing for that “more”. We don’t need a flashlight for this; we need the kind of light that lives within illumination and enlightenment: that kind of light, that big. And absolutely nothing may stand in the way of our search for it. No orthodoxy, no creed, no belligerent beliefs forced on us by those who stopped their own search before they should have, and who are threatened by voices like old Gilgamesh’s that say their precious gods, creeds and rituals are irrelevant and useless. These are the voices that say time really can make ancient good uncouth. Not just wrong, but uncouth. The liberal spirit empowers us to barge through all obstacles in the way of finding the kind of truth that can set us free, make us feel more alive, and help us heal ourselves and our world.

But the second question – and I think this is the deepest and most easily overlooked question in all of religion – is “Who and what does the Light serve?” This truth we seek: what must it serve? To what must it bind us in order to be the kind of truth that can really grant us the kind of wholeness, aliveness and health we seek? The word “religion” means “reconnection.” It is about binding us to life-giving truths through a personal covenant – which is the subject of next week’s sermon.

But when we move to this second question, we are no longer in the realm of simplistic scientific or rational answers. Now we are in the realm of poetry, metaphor, and love-talk. And in love-talk, the answer is that the truth and the light must serve God. Even more than God. It must serve Life: all of life. The kind of truth that can help us come more fully alive originates within the life force – not within religious scriptures or communities – and must return us to that life force to complete the circle, and to bring us home again.

If it builds fences at the edges of our own comfortable beliefs, and excludes or damns those who believe differently, than we have found something too small to be worthy of our yearnings. If it divides the world into the saved and the damned – where we and those who think like us just happen to be among the saved – then we have hitched our wagon to a lie, rather than to a star. If the light we find starts becoming a little spotlight shining just on our face and telling us we – just we – are special, special, special, then we have been duped and seduced, and need to be awakened from our illusions.

There is a little passage in the Christian scriptures that sums this up in just ten words: “Examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good.” (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Examine everything carefully – that’s the liberal spirit. Hold fast to that which is good – that’s the spirit of religion. And what is good – the light that is truly a light unto the world – is what connects us with truths that make us come alive, that help us heal ourselves and our world. You can call it what is good, what is of God, or what is sacred. We can only get at this sort of thing through symbols, metaphors, and love-talk.

That kind of light is the most ancient symbol of religion. We’ll light the light up here on our little ledge every week, as a symbol of that transcendence, illumination and enlightenment, to lift up and liberate the light that is the promise of honest religion. We’ll light a light every week. But it won’t always be the same. Today it’s just one flame. Next week there will be three flames, and three banners hanging above them. Then in a few weeks there will be some more feminine shapes for the candle bases instead of just these X shapes. At the end of September, there will be a family of five candles of different sizes and shapes, lit by a family of five of our church members. On the 12th of October there will be seven lights arranged like a four-foot wide menorah for a service on Atonement in harmony with the Jewish high holy days. A church member who is a rabbi will blow the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn – you don’t want to miss this – and I’ll try to find seven church members with Jewish backgrounds who would like to come up and light the seven flames. You get the idea. We want to liberate the light, to let it point in many directions, not just toward us. We dare not limit the light or fence the spirit, because in order to serve us well, that light and that spirit must serve all of life. We are cups of water from the ocean of life; we need to be reconnected with the ocean.

There is an aliveness in us that wants us to become whole and fulfilled. Call it our spirit, or the spirit of life within us, our Buddha-seed or our God-seed. It’s that spark of the infinite within us, the stardust that resides in every atom of our being. Sometimes we get frightened, or seduced, or bribed, or numbed by habit and conformity. We settle for smaller, second-hand identities. We become merely a man or a woman or an American or a Christian or a Muslim, merely a Unitarian or a University of Texas booster. You’ll find that distinction between small and large, first- and second-hand identities, preached by almost every good religious thinker in history, including the three 19th Century Unitarian preachers we’ll talk about later this fall.

To some extent, the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus is all of our stories – that’s why myths last for centuries, after all. He fell in love with his own reflection and was so entranced by it that he could no longer experience the huge world around him. We so easily go to sleep.

That’s why we gather here: to call forth the better angels of our nature, that they may kindly or rudely awaken us and beckon us back to the spirit of life, where we belong, where we can examine everything carefully, and hold fast to what is good. It’s that challenging combination that makes us both liberal, and religious. It’s a very good place to be.