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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
March 8, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Wisdom is more than just knowledge. In fact, sometimes we have to unlearn things to have greater wisdom. Sometimes wisdom is found in uncertainty, making mistakes and the ineffable experience of our interconnectedness with the interdependent web of all existence. Sometimes wisdom is found in experiences deeper than just the cognitive.
Chalice Lighting
At this hour, in small towns and big cities, in single rooms and ornate sanctuaries, many of our sibling Unitarian Universalist congregations are also lighting a flaming chalice. As we light our chalice today; let us remember that we are part of a great community of faith. May this dancing flame inspire us to fill our lives with the Unitarian Universalist ideals of love, justice, and truth.
Call to Worship
-Hafez
The beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor, hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Moment for Beloved Community
“Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict.”
– The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change
Meditation Reading
-Marcus Borg
It happened as I was driving along through a sunless rural Minnesota landscape. The only sounds were the wind and the drone of the car. I had been on the road for about three hours. The light suddenly changed. It became yellowy and golden and it suffused everything I saw: the snow covered fields left and right, the trees bordering the fields, the yellow and black road signs, the highway itself. Everything glowed. Everything looked wondrous. I was amazed.
I had never experienced anything like that before unless perhaps in very early childhood and so I no longer remembered it. At the time I felt the falling away of the subject-object distinction of ordinary every day consciousness. That dome of consciousness in which we experience ourselves as in-here and world as out-there. I became aware not just intellectually but experientially at the connectedness of everything. I saw the connectedness, experienced it. My sense of being in here while the world was out there momentarily disappeared. That experience lasted maybe a minute and then faded, but it had been the richest minute of my life. It was not only full of wonder but also filled with a strong sense of knowing, of seeing more clearly and truly than I had ever had.
Sermon
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”– Albert Einstein
This month, our religious education classes and activities are examining the concepts of awakening and wisdom.
How do we awaken our wisdom? How is wisdom different than knowledge?
I’m betting that many of you, like me, have been following the developments with the coronavirus with some degree of concern, so I thought I would start with a little wisdom from our public health officials on how to try to contain the spread of viruses.
While there is certainly no reason to panic at this point, there are some practical things we can all do.
First if we are sick with cold-like symptoms we should stay home.
We’ve placed flyers all around the church with information on proper hand washing and other sanitary measures we can all follow, such as covering our mouth when we sneeze or cough and keeping food preparation areas sanitary.
We also found a formula for making our own hand sanitizer and ordered the ingredients to do so because pre-prepared sanitizer has been sold out pretty much everywhere. We will place it around the church as soon as the ingredients come in.
Another thing we can all do is become aware of not touching our hands to our faces. We all tend to this a lot without realizing, and it is one of most common ways that we end up infecting ourselves with something.
The Center for Disease Control has recently advised that older adults and folks with severe chronic illnesses stay at home as much as possible. They don’t define what they mean by “older adults”, sorry.
If you do make the decision to stay at home and would like to watch the church services via the internet, church staff will be happy to show you how to access the the video if you do not already know how to do so.
I also have a service which would allow me to talk with you over video on the internet if we needed to so during the week.
And finally, though many of us enjoy shaking hands or hugging each other, let’s please display our affection for one another with elbow bumps instead for the time being.
The management team here at the church will continue to monitor the situation very closely and will let you know if any further precautions become necessary.
OK, public health announcement over, so back to wisdom.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident once wrote,
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil is. Against evil, one can protest; it can be exposed and, if necessary, stopped with force. Evil always carries the seed of its own self-destruction, because it at least leaves people with a feeling of uneasiness. But against stupidity, we are defenseless.”
Current theologian and minister, Tim Suttle writes that he is seeing a disturbing similarity in modern day America’s lack of wisdom, as that of the German’s in Bonhoeffer’s time.
Suttle notes that what many Americans lack is not knowledge. Instead, there is a refusal to apply that knowledge in wise ways and to dismiss as fake new any knowledge that contradicts our prejudices.
Witness the denial of so many about the growing possibility for global climate catastrophe.
Suttle says that contemporary America has lost several types of wisdom.
First – The wisdom of compromise. He writes, “Only fools believe in win-at-all-costs situations.” It is not that we need to sacrifice our values – but he notes that we gain wisdom through relationship with each other, particularly those with different Life experiences and world views. We can do more together than we can from within our ideological trenches.
Second – The wisdom of change. Trappist monk and mystic, Thomas Merton once said, “If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a hectic, you are not growing spiritually.” Yet so many remain entrenched in dogma and ideology, never learning, never growing. Growth and wisdom always involve change.
Third – The Wisdom of Fidelity. By fidelity, Suttle means staying engaged with each other even when we disagree or make mistakes and being willing to work for the good of society over and above what we want for own lives.
Fourth – The wisdom of suffering. Suttle says that we gain wisdom through our hurts and our mistakes. None of us can really avoid suffering in life, but too many of us try to numb it through the use of drugs, alcohol, television, habitual shopping, smart phone binging, etc.
And finally – The wisdom of uncertainty. So much wisdom arises out of mystery and paradox – in having the humility to recognize how much we really do not and cannot know.
I loved that reading from Marcus Borg that Leo shared with us earlier. There is sense of mysteriousness and paradox in these ineffable experiences of interconnectedness and oneness that so many of us have had.
And I think those experiences bless us with a wisdom that goes deeper than rational knowledge and move us toward acting with more compassion and wiseness in our world.
So ultimately what I think Suttle is trying to get at is that too many Americans have lost that sense of our interconnectedness and the many forms of wisdom to be found within it.
I would add to Suttle’s list several other sources of wisdom.
Sometimes wisdom can come from sorting through our rational knowledge to find what is really useful and strip away what is not. As our call to worship put it, “shake all the nonsense out.”
Paying attention to what our bodies are telling us and getting in touch with our emotions are also a part of awakening our full capacity for wisdom.
This is a lesson I have had to learn more than once. For instance, after my step-father, Ty, who had been more of a father to me than my actual dad, after Ty died in April of 2015, I found myself just feeling numb.
There was a sense of unreality.
And for a couple of weeks, it was as if I completely shut down emotionally.
I went though the routines of life and my ministry here at the church, but I couldn’t feel anything much less locate the pleasure and joy I normally get from life and ministry.
And then one day, I was talking with Meg, and I realized that what was happening was that I had been depressed. That for me, depression isn’t a feeling of sadness; it’s feeling nothing.
It was only after this realization, after I finally let myself fully experience my grief and sorrow over losing my step-dad that the depression began to lift.
It was only after I let myself have a good cry or two that I began to also the able to feel gratitude and joy and happiness again.
So our wisdom arises from our whole selves, our reasoning and know ledge, yes, but also our physical and emotional selves.
And, as I mentioned briefly earlier, but it is well worth repeating, our wisdom also comes from being willing to take risks and make mistakes. Sometimes our mistakes are our greatest teachers.
So, as artist and writer Debbie Millman puts it, “If you are not making mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks. Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody has ever made before.”
I think we can also find a special sort of wisdom within the metaphors contained in our stories, myths and poetry.
There is wisdom to be found in our music and drama – in our rituals and the arts.
All of these help us to grasp and understand life’s complexities in ways we cannot with only literal thinking.
This is the error, in my opinion, that too many people make by trying to read the bible or other sacred texts literally and thereby missing or even distorting the metaphorical wisdom such texts often contain.
For me, getting out into nature can also shift my thinking to this bigger picture, more metaphorical form of contemplation.
OK, we have now come to the portion of our service where I harp on the importance of spiritual practices, as I have been and will be doing each time I preach this year.
Spiritual practices, meditation or gardening or knitting, whatever you find connects you with the greater wisdom that is already within you, also help us become even wiser because these practices can also help to shift our perspective on life.
So sometimes our knowledge doesn’t change through our spiritual practices, but our understanding of that knowledge, our worldview, does.
Likewise, our readings and hymns and music and rituals and, I hope at least sometimes our sermons, here in worship at the church may provide us with new knowledge or insights but can also just help us shift our perspectives around knowledge we already had.
And this is likely more true the more we can engage, once again with our whole selves, intellect, physical and emotional. And his capacity to grow wisdom I think is there throughout the life of the church.
Certainly I believe our wonderful teachers and other religious education folks, along with our public forum folks, are helping people of all ages to cultivate greater wisdom.
When we work together for social justice and against all fonns of oppression, we encounter difference, which, in turn, can enhance our own wisdom and shift our perspectives once again.
Our work for the environment reminds us of the wisdom that we are indeed not separate from the interdependent web of all existence but a part of it.
Our First UU Cares Council teaches us the wisdom of caring for each other.
Our Fun and Fellowship and our games night remind us of the wisdom that we need fun, friendship, community, joy in our lives.
Our art gallery, Paradox Players, our many musical programs bring these special sources of wisdom to us.
Well, I could go on and on but there are about another 80 or so ministry teams and church programs I haven’t mentioned yet, so I better stop now.
My point is that as a religious community, in these and so many more ways, I believe we can and do help each other grow our wisdom.
Today is International Women’s Day, so I would be remiss if I were to fail to mention that in Proverbs of the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s wisdom is personified as Woman Wisdom or Sophia.
Sophia, Woman Wisdom, hearkens back to the Tree of Life. She was there at the very act of creation, frolicking in God’s presence and taking delight as God fashioned humanity, the heavens and earth, placing true wisdom within the interconnectedness between the many elements of God’s creation.
So my fellow guys, let us ponder in the days to come over what metaphorical truth Proverbs may be trying to teach us.
I’ll leave you with a poem by Unitarian Universalist minister Leslie Takahashi. It is titled, “Labyrinth”.
“Walk the maze within your heart: guide your steps into its questioning curves.
This labyrinth is a puzzle leading you deeper into your own truths.
Listen in the twists and turns.
Listen in the openness within all searching.
Listen: a wisdom within you calls to a wisdom beyond you
and in that dialogue lies peace.”
Here, as a religious community, may we walk the maze of life together.
Here, in this sacred place, may we help each other find the wisdom within us that calls to a wisdom beyond us.
Amen and blessed be.
Benediction
– Khalil GibranKeep me away from the wisdom which does not cry,
the philosophy which does not laugh,
and the greatness which does not bow before children.
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